I picked up the book The Kitchen Gardener’s Handbook
After I chopped off their pumpkin heads and scooped out their guts, I filled them full of the pie filling.
I hate to say this, but I felt very Martha Stewart’ish while making these. They were that cute.
They didn’t taste quite like pumpkin pie but they were good. It was a delicious fall sort of comfort food.
The title of this post may seem a little silly, until you realize I don’t have an oven. When we moved into our house three years ago, the first thing we did was cut the electric and gut most of the house. The kitchen will probably be the last thing that we get around to rewiring and renovating. For three years I have been cooking on a hot plate, a wood stove, or a BBQ grill. You wouldn’t believe how much this limits your options.
Last week Lee got me a convection toaster oven–basically a miniature oven. We haven’t been so excited about a small appliance in years! Finally, baking was an option for me again.
The first thing I did was make a cherry pie from scratch. Yup, that is one happy pie!
After so many years of not having an oven I had forgotten all the things I used to make. Suddenly, I’m realizing I can bake bread, buy a frozen pizza, make a quiche, whip up some muffins, bake some biscuits, make a lasagna, broil fish, roast a small chicken, etc. The possibilities are endless.
I’m so happy I can bake again. It’s such a small thing but it’s amazing how much you miss it when it’s gone.
The rains have come to Oregon and our summer garden is winding down. Saturday was the last dry day, so it was time for us to harvest produce, remove dead plants, and roll up the drip hoses.
All my squash vines had bad cases of powdery mildew and were dying. My Jack Be Little pumpkin plant produced the most squash of any. It was a very bad garden year for squash. The next most productive variety was Carnival with four whole squash!
I seemed to have averaged one pumpkin or winter squash per vine with a couple of plants producing two. Pathetic! I’m not sure whether this was caused by the late planting, the very cool summer, or lack of pollination. It could very well be all three.
I have one very late green pumpkin that isn’t going to ripen in time. I left it out in the garden hoping for more sun. Most likely the frost or rain will kill it and then I will just feed it to the chickens.
I pulled out my Tiger Eye bean plants and shelled them. The beans did an excellent job drying on the plants. Someday we will grow enough dry beans to actually eat some.
Lee dug our two rows of potatoes. We planted them in late June (along with most everything else in our garden) and weren’t sure if we would even get a harvest.
We ended up with 108 lbs of potatoes from our 60 linear feet of row. That’s on par with past yields, and not too bad considering we planted third-generation potatoes really late in the season.
The popcorn is going to be a bust I think. I checked several ears of corn Saturday, but none of them were ready. We’ve had torrents of rain since then. I am expecting the corn to rot, as I don’t think there is much sun in the forecast for October. With the potatoes beds nicely tilled, I am going to plant garlic in them as soon as it stops raining. On a bad note, as we were digging potatoes we think we found a few symphylans. I am going to do the water soil test to make sure. If we do have them, rototilling and crop rotation seem to be your options for dealing with this pest.
My one cayenne pepper plant has turned red with peppers. I haven’t actually picked them yet as I’m not sure what to do with them. Does anyone else out there plant things without knowing what to do with them?
My Brussel sprouts are still growing. I tend to refer to them as “green balls” as I seem to forget their name 99% of the time. I actually had my first taste of Brussel sprouts this year, which was why I decided to plant some. It’s never too late to try a new veggie.
Our favorite cherry tomatoes, Sun Gold, are still chugging along. I actually have a lot of tomatoes that need to be picked, but I’ve been burnt out on canning for the last few days. As a final preserving project for the year, I’m going to can up some batches of stew tomatoes.
I HATE picking blackberries with a passion. Lee tried to have me pick blackberries last year but he gave up after some massive whining from my part. It went along the lines of, “It’s too hot. The berries are all moldy. The berries won’t pull off good. It’s too hot. The berries are too small. The mosquitoes are eating me. It’s too hot. The thorns are poking me. I’m not doing it any more!”
This year I really wanted some blackberry jam so I talked myself into walking out to our field to assess the blackberry state. The weather was cool, no mosquitoes in sight, and the blackberries were big. I picked berries until I filled my pot.
This was my first jam making experience. All 10 half pints of blackberry-peach jam jelled up which made me quite pleased. What I am going to do with 10 half pints I don’t know, as that is an awful lot of jam. I’ve already given one away and have similar plans for a few more of them.
After making the jam I still had half of my berries left so I decided to make some blackberry syrup. Six pints of syrup later (and some left over in a jar) a brilliant idea occurred to me. Blackberry mojitos! They were fabulous! Now all I need to do is make some pancakes to go with my mojito.
This spring I ordered a sunflower collection from Seed Savors Exchange. I love sunflowers! They make me smile ridiculously big every time I pass by them in the garden. Yeah, they are a little silly and mostly useless (unless you plant an edible variety), but who cares?
Three riotous lush summer gardens,
and winters of shivering at night,
Three springtime’s first flushes of flowering,
and setting fall woodstoves alight.
Three years of successes and losses,
of planning and strides and delay,
But from three hundred meters the view is,
a life getting better each day.
Thursday was the third anniversary of our folly.
I got worried about my meager tomato harvest, so last Friday I stopped by a local farm store that was having a special on bulk veggies. I picked up three 20 lb boxes of tomatoes and one 10 lb box of jalapeños. Since Friday I’ve processed 18 pints seasoned tomato sauce, 7 pints Italian tomato sauce, 31 pints of various salsas, 5 pints whole jalapeños with honey and allspice, 7 pints hot cumin pickled zucchini, and 8 half pints jalapeño candy. I’m still recovering from all that canning, so I’m posting the following pictures without any comments.
Filling chicken founts up everyday and sloshing water down your leg is a total drag! We love the automatic chicken waterer that we set up in our garden chicken pen so it was time to outfit the new hen pen with one too. Lee built a stand out of scrap wood in a few hours and set me to work painting it. If you take the trouble to build something you might as well paint it so it lasts longer. Lee said the stand looked Gothic to him and I said it looked whimsical.
We retrofitted the barrel that we had set up for our pig waterer last year, and poof, we had a chicken waterer fit for a king.
The picture below is an overview of the structures in the chicken pen. The reconfigurable chicken house in the middle is set up as a roosting house now. I think we need to lower the roost bar a little bit, as not all the chickens are too keen on using it at the moment. The reconfigurable range shelter to the left only has food and nesting boxes in it now. The nesting boxes at this moment are cardboard ones as some of the hens have started laying (willy-nilly around the pen) and Lee hasn’t got a chance to build real ones yet. (Actually, in this picture I had just put the nesting boxes in the shelter. Almost every chicken crammed themselves into the shelter to watch a hen use a box.)
I’ve been bringing scratch corn to their pen every day to train them into coming to me. Like most chickens, they are all corn addicts. It’s especially useful training for the Lakenvelder hens. If they fly out of the pen, we’ll have to lead them back with corn because they are too fast to catch.
It’s been one of those days. Salsa, tomato sauce, and Italian tomato sauce were today’s projects. By the way, if anyone has a salsa recipe that they love, let me know! I’ve got more tomatoes that need canned, and we love salsa!
Three weeks ago I excitedly gathered dill, cucumbers, and a couple of hot peppers from my garden in order to make some fermented pickles. I wanted to make some Lower East Side Full-Sour Dills (based on a recipe from page 45 of The Joy of Pickling
I layered the veggies and spices in the crock.
I added the weights and the brine and thought it all smelled quite divine.
I filled the water seal in the crock and then put a two week timer in my head for when they should be done.
This is where everything goes dreadfully wrong. Somehow my head decided that the deadline was permanently two weeks away. I realized with dawning horror that I was three weeks into this forgotten project on the counter, so I tentatively opened the crock and took out a pickle for a taste test. It wasn’t awful but it didn’t taste the best either. The mold floating on the surface was rather disconcerting too. With a glum face I decided to toss the pickles and try again later. Next time, I will write the estimated finish time on my calendar. And I’ll check on them more often. And I’ll try not to make fermented veggies during a heat wave (which didn’t help matters either).
