Harvest

Hi all!  Lots of good stuff is popping up in the garden.  I had a great harvest on Monday.  I really need to go out today since we had a torrential rainfall last night and clean some things up out in the garden.  I have cilantro falling down everywhere.  Here's what I harvested:

I picked a ton of lettuce and prepared salads for my husband to go to work.  The zucchini are gorgeous...look at that shine...you can't get that in the store unless there is wax and who knows what else on them.  Most exciting is that my beets are doing fabulous this year.  I picked three on Monday and I expect to pick many more the rest of this week.

The way I prepare them is wrap them up in aluminum foil with some olive oil and salt and roast them in the oven until they are soft.  I cut off all the leaves, but I leave about an inch of stem left...that prevents your beets from "bleeding" out everywhere and making a terrible mess.  Once they are baked, let them cool slightly and use a paper towel to rub the skin off.  Really, it's quite easy and the mess is kept at a minimum.  The family either eats them like that or I cube them up and put them in salads.  It's quite delicious and makes me so happy to know it came from garden to table!  

Another thing that is coming on like crazy around here are the raspberries.  Oh, what joy!  The kids pick them for me and rinse them off and put them in the freezer.  Note: anyone who picks gets the special privilege of eating them!!!  I then wait until they are all harvested (mine are the type that ripen all summer, not all at once) and I make raspberry mango jam--I call it the nectar of God because it is soooooo good!!!  

I do have to scare the birds and squirrels off, but I don't mind sharing a few.  Next year, I think I will be covering the whole patch with bird netting to keep the critters away.  We have double the harvest of last year.  I need to find some good raspberry recipes...feel free to share!!!  I hope all is growing well for you!  Blessings  to you and have a lovely week.

Wordless Wednesday

Favorite vegetable of the summer

This is by far my favorite new variety for the garden this summer!  It's been such a fun thing to grow and everyone gets such a kick out of it when I show it to them!

This is an eight ball zucchini!!!  The plants are quite prolific--you can pick them at golf ball size up to a softball size---this one is probably in between.  They are beautiful and delicious. Between these and my regular zucchini, I have about 14 cups of zucchini frozen and shredded in the freezer, plus the plenty we have eaten already.  We just can't get enough zucchini around here!!!  Can you imagine stuffing one of these for dinner???  I'm going to do it!!!  I'll let you know how it turns out!

What new varieties are you growing???  Have a great weekend...I'm still behind in posts because I have so much to blog about, but we've got an exciting weekend planned so I'll have to tell you all about it next time!  Have a beautiful weekend...blessings!!!

Recycled Jean Quilt is Finished!!!

So much has been going on the last two weeks that I don't even know where to start!  I will keep this post to this quilt.  I had worked on getting it quilted and I really had to hurry because I have a daughter who was entering an apron in the county fair (that is going to be a whole other post!).  I hate having to recalibrate the machine because it took me forever to switch everything over to sew on the denim.  But lo and behold, it is finished!!!!  This is our summer picnic quilt.

There are six of us in the family and every one of us has jeans in this quilt.  The sweltering heat made it really uncomfortable to sew this behemoth!!!  It weighs about seven pounds and I was sweating while I was quilting it on my machine. At one point, I had to go outside with my machine and set up in the shade because it was over 85 degrees...in my house!!!!  I like how it turned out...because I used some stretchy jeans, some of the corners do not match perfectly...OH WELL!!!  This is one of those workhorse kind of quilts so I'm not too worried about the imperfections...that's the whole point of this quilt.  It's all been recycled and getting new life.  

The quilt laid out in the driveway.

Detail of the center...again from jeans we had! (sorry, bad picture)

I hope you are all having a productive summer.  I can finally check one project off my list!  How about you???  Blessings to you, and may you keep cool in this heat!!!

Garden happenings

Cilantro
I don't know about your garden, but one of my self-seeding plants in the garden is my cilantro.  I can seriously consider it a weed because it grows everywhere!!!!  Every year, I let it flower because it is so inviting to all the beneficial insects and then it goes to seed (which I try to control) and then it's growing season is over while everything else starts ramping up...like tomatoes.  I always make salsa and can it and you have no idea how infuriated I am with myself because I have to buy cilantro...from the store...and it's not very cheap...and I had pounds of it weeks before!!!!  Well, no more, my friends...I picked half a pound of it today and I could still get a lot more...I'll keep picking as this week progresses.  I'm freezing it so that I have plenty when it's time for salsa making or if I want to make Chipotle-style burritos!!!  I saw a blog where they clean the cilantro, take off stems, barely put olive oil on it so that everything gets an extremely light coat of it, then I bagged it up and stuck it in the freezer.  I am so thrilled!  Here's what half a pound of cilantro looks like:

The salad spinner I have the cilantro in is not a small one--it's a pretty large hefty one that can really hold some greens!  (I got it at the thrift store for around $5...this brand usually runs around $30...it's already earned it's keep around here!)

Other homestead updates

The garden is just swinging along.  I have my own personal army of ladybugs...it's been so exciting to see that because it helps me feel that the garden is in balance. The lacewings are out, too, so the beneficials are really working hard this summer season.

 I will probably have some yellow squash and zucchini by the end of the week.  We've had some beautiful salads lately and we are just chomping at the bit for the zucchini!!! The peas are prolific and tomatoes are forming left and right.  All in all, it's been a good growing season so far.  

The chickens have been so fun to watch and feed.  I give them tons of garden scraps and I never knew chickens could "honk" like geese.  It's the funniest thing.  Here is something I found on clearance at our local grocery store.  I wanted to do a rooster stencil on our chicken coop, but the bargains never cease to amaze me.  This is the before...

It's a rooster chalkboard.  I paid $3.59 for it because it no longer came with it's stand.  No problem.  I didn't want it as a chalkboard anyway!  Here's where it is now!

This is actually the door of our chicken coop.  We painted the rooster white like the trim, and I hardly had to put any effort into it!!!

Here's the actual full coop pretty much finished.  I have one more thing I have to do with it if I get some time, but it is fully functional and complete!  My husband did such a nice job!!!  The flowers on the front give it a nice touch, too.

The yellow flowers, calibrochoa, I picked up from the store, and just peeking up in the back is one of two agastache (will be purple) that I started from seed indoors.  They should be a striking combination!!!  

I hope all is growing well in your part of the world.  To all my fellow Americans, happy Fourth of July!!!  Be safe and God bless!!!

Canning on the Homestead

First Canning Session of the Year
What to do with all those radishes???

With the several pounds of radishes I have harvested, I had to figure out something to do with them.  Only my husband and youngest daughter really like them, so I decided to make some radish relish so I can preserve them so they will last.  The recipe I used is here.  I have a feeling my husband is really going to like it.  He tried it with all the raw ingredients and said it had good flavor.  I'm sure it will only get better as time goes on and it has time to mellow out.  It gets such a pretty pink and rosy color.  I made two batches and got about 10 half-pints of relish!

This is a nice recipe because you have to let the whole concoction sit for three hours so you have time to get all your jars ready or do other things.  Once that is done, you boil the ingredients for awhile and then jar them up and process (again, see recipe link).  I look forward to seeing how this will taste in a few weeks, but I can rest knowing that none of the radishes went to waste!  Plus, all the tops of the radishes were fed to the chickens.  They loved them and get so excited when they see me coming!  They have been so fun...hopefully, after this coming weekend, I can show you the finished coop!

I hope your gardens are growing beautifully!  Have you started canning anything???  Happy preserving and blessings!

Chicken and garden updates

Wow...time sure does fly when you're gardening! I've got a bunch of updates so I will start with the chickens.  Here's the progression of our coop.

The coop with our salvaged window from a neighbor.

Hubby working on the run and the door has been added on.

Chickens already using the run!

Hubby is still finishing up the coop.  He's got to put on the chicken wire on the back ventilation and he's finishing up the floor.  The chickens are seven weeks old so they really needed some sunshine.  They stayed in the run all night and since it's warm, they have fared very well.  I couldn't sleep because I was so worried about a fox getting his paws/claws through the chicken wire...tonight we'll have them locked up in the coop!  I really need some sleep, haha!  The only supplies we bought for this coop are the screws and hinges, the chicken wire, shingles for the roof (I bet I could have found these but we really needed them now) and the paint (hello, $5 oops paint at Home Depot that normally runs over $37 for one gallon--who can afford that???)  My husband did a great job and we need to put up the trim and finish painting.  I can't wait until it's finished.

The garden is coming along well!  I've had my battles though.  Flea beetles are now prevalent in my backyard and they love the radishes!!!  I think I will continue to sow radishes so that the flea beetles will only bother them...a trap crop.  This is the first year I've grown radishes and they have turned out beautiful (minus the holey leaves!). 

They truly are the jewels of the garden and are so lovely to photograph!

The greens are coming on strong as well.  We had our first garden salad last night with the radishes.  My spinach has turned out really nice this year.  I've kept them spaced properly and they have just flourished.

I am up against the insects, though.  The ants have gone crazy and now I have the flea beetles.  It's an ongoing struggle, and I've found aphids, too.  I've spied a few ladybugs so between me squishing and the ladybugs devouring, we may stay on top of things.  Here's one last shot of the garden from an "aerial" perspective.  This is taken from my bedroom window.

I've laid down hay as a mulch between the boxes.  I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet, but I consider it the cheap man's pathway.  I would love to put flagstone or brick or pavers down, but that's not in the budget any time soon, so we'll see how this works for me.  It gets quite windy sometimes so we'll see if the hay is still there in a few weeks.  I hope your gardening and homesteading is going well.  Let me know how your garden grows and happy homesteading!  Blessings!