My garlic had been sitting outside drying, waiting for me to take care of it. Today I trimmed the roots off, peeled the outer skin layer, and braided them. I probably waited to long before I dug them up, as some were starting to go bad in the ground. Most of the garlic was okay. Next year it should be easier for me to tell when it is time to dig them up as the bulbs will be planted in the right season. They are very tasty and I have been cooking with them for the last couple of weeks.

We ate the first bell pepper out of our garden. I had never gotten one to grow before this time. Lee and I both agreed that it had a better taste than the ones in store. It was very crisp and juicy when you bite into it. Now I am in a quandary about whether to plant them next year as I had almost decided not too. I was thinking next year of planting mainly hot peppers and buying my regular peppers in the store.

The sunflowers are getting ready to bloom out. These are a Snack Mix sunflower. So after they get done blooming, if I manage to save any from the birds, I will have sunflower seeds to eat. We are thinking about letting the birds get most of them, but covering one sunflower head with a bag so we can collect seed for next years planting.

Here is one of our plant failures this year. This is Double Color Amaranth. I planted a whole row of it but only a few seeds sprouted. Lee was disappointed. He wanted grain amaranth but this was what he got instead since the store didn’t have it. It is used like a lettuce or for its ornamental quality.

My pumpkin has turned orange in the last 11 days since I wrote about it. I don’t think that pumpkins believe in doing anything slow.

Lee’s buckwheat is blooming away. He is hoping to harvest the seeds. I always forget that it is a grain as it looks nothing like a wheat stalks.

Overall I am pretty happy with how the garden is coming along. Lee has gotten really frustrated a few time thinking that nothing was going to grow. Somethings haven’t done well and others have been fine. I tell him not to worry as every year in the garden it will be different. Some things you can change to make plants happier and other things you can’t.

Soon we will be (or already are) overflowing with more beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, greens, corn, and lettuce then we will know what to do with. It is very exciting as each new vegetable comes into season.

It’s 104 degrees outside today. Lee put up the electrified netting as a temporary fence around the chicken house so they wouldn’t overheat inside. One Barred Rock and two Rhode Island Reds were the bravest of the bunch and ventured out. Mostly they were all really freaked out of their little minds.

Everyone seems to be doing fine. They are all still growing good and are going though their water and feed more quickly. The Barred Rocks and the Rhode Island Reds are extremely friendly. The only really spooky chicken we have is Elwood the Araucana. Why I don’t know, as her Araucana pal Jake is nothing like her. Maybe poor Elwood is just not a bright one and has separation anxiety from her hatched shell. The world seems to be a little too much for poor Elwood.

My nephew has been brewing beer for almost a year, and he has progressively raised my interest level in it. (Another factor is Oregon’s large selection of good craft beers.) I finally took the plunge and bought beer making gear and ingredients for a German style wheat beer (hefeweizen) at Valley Vintners & Brewer. I also tracked down a propane burner for heating water (the sort people use to burn down their houses when frying turkeys). The basic beer making process is pretty straightforward: steep grains in hot water, boil malt extract, add hops at certain times, strain into a carboy with cold water, chill to less than 80°, and pitch the yeast. The devil is in the details … and the sanitation.

The picture at the right is my first batch 36 hours into fermentation. The half gallon mason jar is acting as an air lock to deal with all the foam. I’ll rack to a secondary in a week, and then bottle it 1 to 2 weeks after that. Beer brewing is more rewarding than wine making (if you like beer) because the result is ready so quickly. As is my wont, I’m already reading about ways to make the process more complicated and less dependent on purchased ingredients: grain mash brewing, yeast washing, barley malting, hop growing, etc. Now my long term goal is to brew directly from barley and hops grown on site. Don’t tell Robin. I think her long term goal is electric lighting.

I had some kohlrabi growing in my garden that I needed to use. I was dying to try pickling them but had a hard time finding recipes online. Well, there was one recipe, but it was copied in so many places that it made me mad. There had to be more than one pickled kohlrabi recipe out there for me to chose from. I finally found one by searching for Kohlrabi in the book The Joy Of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich. I think that I am actually going to buy the book as I was pretty impressed after looking through the Table of Contents on Amazon.

According to the recipe that I followed it will be ready to eat in a day or two and will keep for three weeks. I can hardly wait to try it. There is enough kohlrabi to make one more pickled quart jar recipe. So if its good I may try another batch.

I finally racked (siphoned) my dandelion wine off the lees (gunk at the bottom of the carboy) and into a clean new carboy. It has been 2 and a half months since I prepared the wine in two posts. Racking once a month would be better. Past 3 months, and the wine can pick up off flavors from the lees. I didn’t have anything to siphon with until now (I just bought a beer brewing kit), so I let it go a little long. The smell during racking was alcoholic and fruity. A have a glass of the dregs settling in the fridge to taste.

Sorry for the lack of picture, but it basically looks the same as before. It’s less cloudy, but not clear. I finally found my Back Home magazine issue in storage with the dandelion recipe I originally wanted to follow. The author suggests racking every 2 weeks, and start drinking at 6 weeks. He also doesn’t separate the petals from the flower heads. Otherwise, the recipe is very similar. I’ll try it next year and see how it compares.

Today I went down to my mom’s house and we put the juice from all those cherries we canned to good use. We made five jars of cherry jam and eleven jars of cherry syrup for pancakes. Wow is it ever good!

Yup, they really are that color of purple. When you bite into them you forget that your bean “should” be green. They have a nice juicy flavor that Lee and I really like. Besides they are green inside.

Much to my surprise I saw that I was behind in gathering my garden produce. This evening I went and picked one row of my beans. Since my canner isn’t coming in the mail until Friday, I decided to freeze them. The beans have the same sort of enzyme and bacteria that is in other vegetable. So to preserve the color, texture, and nutrients, I needed to blanch before freezing. I blanched for three minutes instead of two for the reason of my pieces being bigger. Then I cooled the beans off in cold water and into the freezer containers they went.

In case you can’t get over having your beans purple just cook them. After being blanched for three minutes this is what they look like.

Five and one half quarts of frozen beans later and still two more bean rows to pick. I think I may soon get tired of snapping beans.

Friday morning my Mom, 2 sisters, 2 nieces, my Uncle, and I decided to go cherry picking for pie cherries. In just a short order we had picked a little over 130 pounds of cherries. My Uncle decided that he wanted his 40 pounds of cherries dried in his home made dryer. My Mom, my sister Jessica, and I wanted our cherries canned.

Before we started pitting the cherries, the dishwasher was loaded up with canning jars to get them sanitized.

My Mom started washing the cherries and sorting through them, removing bad ones, stems, and debris.

We opted out of having the cherries pitted for us, since the machine at Deterings Orchard only removes about 50% of the pits. My Uncle has two hand operated pitters that do one cherry at a time. These were set up and cherry pitting commenced.

While my Uncle and I were endlessly pitting, my mom washed the rings and lids for the canning jars in soapy water.

My mom had a trick for making sure the lids wouldn’t glue to each other–she faced the lids together.

The jar lids were put in a pot, covered with water, brought to a boil, and then turned down to low heat. They sat there until we needed them.

The water bath canner was put on to the stove and brought up to a boil. I believe that my mom filled the canner up to the first line from the bottom of the canner.

As the water bath canner was heating up, a sugar water mix was made. We heated water until the sugar was dissolved. My mom used a very light sugar mixture: 1 cup of sugar to 1 quart of water. The sugar water solution helps the cherries stay firmer during canning with better flavor and color.

We put 1/4 cup of the sugar water mix into the bottom of the jar and then added the cherries. We thumped the bottom of the jar a couple of times to settle the cherries and then topped it off about 1/2 inch from the top.

After the jars were filled with cherries, we filled them up with the sugar water syrup to 1/2 inch from the top.

The rims of the filled jars were wiped clean. This is necessary so the lids will seal after they have been canned. Then we placed a sanitized lid on each jar and screwed the ring down tightly.

Mom loaded the canner rack and set it down into the water. She added water as necessary so it covered the jars. With the lid on, we waited until it came to a rolling boil with steam spitting out and set the timer for 25 minutes.

TADA! Our first batch of canned cherries. Now we just repeat, repeat, …

So what did I think about my first “grown up” experience in canning? It was long but exciting. Normally it would go a little faster, but processing over 130 pounds of cherries just isn’t going to be speedy. With all the helping hands we were able to do this all in a day. I would have maybe left some of the cherries until the next day. My Mom said that they start deteriorating very fast so you need to do it all in one day. We did save the juice from the cherries to make into jelly and refrigerated that. My Mom stayed up until 1:45 AM finishing up the canning. The rest of us left as there was nothing more to do.

Not counting my Uncle’s 40 pounds of cherries, my Mom, my sister, and I ended up with 14 jars of cherries each. There were originally 43 1/2 quarts, but a quart jar and a pint jar broke in the canner. My mom said that usually happens if there is a flaw in the glass, and as some of her jars were older than her it is bound to happen. Though two being broken in one canning session was the first for her. The broken jar in the canner made for a later night, as all the water had to be dumped out and then new water had to be heated back up.

Finally I will leave you with a picture of one of the bowls of pits. Yeah, I was just a little bit tired of that job by the end.

Robin has been unhappy with my thrown-together theme since we started this website. However, as documented here on a regular basis, other things tend to take priority. I finally found motivation to work on a personalized theme for a few evenings, and the result was installed tonight. Feel free to post comments. I haven’t thoroughly tested this layout with Internet Exploder and other browsers. We only use Firefox at our house.

Special thanks to charfade for the grass brush set used in several places and to redheadstock for the vector foliage brush set where I lifted the vine detail. I lack the talent or experience to create these brush effects from scratch in any reasonable amount of time. Finally, a big thanks to the developers of Gimp, the great opensource image editor.

Yesterday, when pulling up a turnip and looking at it’s size I decided I needed to do something about them. So today I went out and pulled all of the big ones. It seemed that when they got bigger and tougher the root maggots made less damage on them. That’s my theory at least.

I peeled them and then chopped the turnips into small 1/2 inch cubes. After that was done, I put them into boiling water, covered the pot, and blanched the cubes for two minutes. When the blanching was finished, I dumped them into a pot of cold water for three minutes before placing the turnip cubes into the freezer containers. There ended up being a little over 2 quarts. It’s not much, but it will still be nice come winter time when I make soup.

You need to blanch the turnips so the enzymes and bacteria get killed. Otherwise your turnips will lose their nutrients, flavor, and texture. I knew you were supposed to do this with broccoli but didn’t realize that turnips would need it done also. Thankfully I looked it up before I embarked on freezing them.

Aggie decided that she really liked turnips and got into the bag holding the leaves. By the time she had finished the entire bag was emptied and the contents were all over the floor.