Just Because....

Katie Mae picked these flowers.

It's Been A While......

I know it's been a while since I've posted when I had to stop and think a minute to remember the name of my blog so I could get to it online!!!  Oh well.  There have been no shortage of things to write about and plenty of pictures to post, but it takes time to keep up a blog and my time has been spent on more important things lately!

In a nutshell:

The garden has died down.  I used the last of the spinach in supper tonight and there might be a bit of kale that is still hanging on; there may be an herb or two that's still usable, but other than that, the winter has finally taken over.  I never do as good a job of wintering it over as I'd like to.  It's an excellent idea to plant cover crops for both erosion control and the replacement of nutrients into the soil, but I never seem to make that last step!    I canned corn for the first time this year, a new kind of apple pie filling, about 4 new kinds of jam, and venison stew for the first time as well as everything else I usually can.  At my highest point, I had nearly 700 full jars in the basement, but it's amazing how quickly they start to empty!

We went on a camping trip in late October.  We drove south on the Parkway all the way to the end, camping in different campgrounds along the way.  I hadn't been along the southernmost 200 miles of the Parkway since I was a little girl, so I enjoyed driving down it SO MUCH.  It was absolutely breathtaking.  We drove through fall foliage that was at peak, to past peak, to trees that were completely bare at the highest elevations.  It was all seriously breathtaking.  Halfway through the trip, we met up with some Mazda RX-7 enthusiasts and drove along with them for a day and camped with a group of them for one night.  We had to cut our trip short thanks to the threat of Hurricane Sandy coming through, which in hindsight  we were VERY glad we did.  The heater had stopped working on our camper and we would have FROZEN if we'd stayed any longer.  We had a wonderful time on our trip; I look forward to the possibility of camping next year.

Chuck the steer is no more.  We raised him until he was just over 500 lb and butchered him mid October.  I thoroughly enjoyed milking Daisy and owning a milk cow, and enjoyed hand raising Chuck, but I also enjoy not being tied down to the house to make sure they're fed and cared for or milked.  I love raising our own meat so much and having copious amounts of delicious raw dairy.  And I don't mind the work.  The kids LOVED caring for them with me, but gosh, it's nice to not have to figure out if I have to feed Chuck before or after supper and so on and so forth.  I guess I want my cake and eat it too.  Let's see; I want my milk and drink it too? :P  I don't know if there are more farm animals in our future or not.  I still would really really love to raise chickens and hogs.  :)

The kids are growing by leaps and bounds, every last one of them.  Elizabeth is talking up a blue streak.  She'll be 2 two weeks from today.  Wow.  How did that happen!?  She amazes me at how many colors, letters,and signs she knows.  I think she's asked "What's that?" more than any other child.  Savannah and Alan are both doing online math lessons which they love and online typing lessons which they love.  Katie Mae just wrote her name for the first time today all by herself and did a fantastic job!  Savannah, Alan, and I have spent parts of yesterday and today making paper snowflakes.  We've made 60 snowflakes that we've kept.  It's just so much fun to see what creation you can come up with next!  Now we need to decorate with them!

As anyone probably already knows that is reading this, we had the strange and bizarre occurrence of a scared deer jumping through the girls' bedroom window 3 weeks ago.  Basically, the deer turned our house upside down, wrecking the inside of most of our home before Aaron had to shoot it before it caused any further damage.  Life since then has been rather interesting.  With some help from our homeowner's insurance, we're doing some replacing of flooring, repainting, and several other improvements that we've discovered need to be made.  It took 3 days before we could even live in the house again the damage, blood, and hair were so covering our entire house.  We've been without carpet for those three weeks and on dirty sub-flooring for the past week, but as I type this, I'm taking in the delicious aroma of 16 new sheets of plywood next to me in the living room corner just waiting to be laid.  Our house will certainly look a good bit different once we've gotten it put back together! It looks like it may be as much as another month before everything is put back together, but we're making it work!!  I think the newness has started to wear off what with all 4 kids sleeping in one room since the girls' room is gutted and being used as a storage room.  I keep it new by letting them switch off who sleeps on the air mattress and who sleep in the bunk bed.  The bunk bed has new appeal ever since the air mattress sprung a leak last night, so they're now sleeping on the floor!  Living in the small community we live in, it took less than 24 hours for the local paper to call us to ask for our story; it can be found here.

Coloring Buddies

All of the kids color a lot.  Every day, at least one or two, if not all four children gather around the table to color.  I love watching them color and it's usually one of the quieter activities of the day which make me like it even more.  Elizabeth will color for quite some time.  She really seems to have a pretty decent attention span.  She's starting to learn her colors, mainly from coloring with her siblings so much.  She likes to say "pink" and "two" while holding up to crayons.

First Fire

I  love using wood heat as our primary source of heat in the wintertime.  Tonight, the low is supposed to be in the low to mid thirties, and the temperature had already dipped below 70 in the house by suppertime.  It has been rainy and foggy and cool all day, so Aaron put the first crate of firewood on the deck.  I wish we had glass doors so you could always see the fire, but we have a grate we use occasionally just for ambiance.  The drawback to using the grate all the time is how quickly the wood burns of course, and it also doesn't do quite as good of a job at heating the house.  For the first fire of the year though, you gotta watch it burn! I'm looking forward to this winter! :)

Elizabeth Loves Daddy

Canning Corn

I haven't grown corn in 10 years. The first and only other time I grew corn was the first year we were married, and I just didn't have much luck with it. It was chewy, it didn't produce well, I don't know, I just didn't have much interest in growing it. I'd rather grow something that's a bit more nutritious than corn anyway. I love corn, but it's..well..just a starch. But, someone gave me two big bags of corn seeds, and I also had some popcorn seeds that I was given several years ago. Savannah LOVES corn and was SO excited about the prospect of growing some, so we planted 6 short rows. It did pretty well. We planted our green beans with the corn, so they grew up the corn stalks. It was nice not having to stake my beans! That in an of itself was worth it! I may do it again just for that very reason. I'll search for some heirloom varieties that are non GMO and not have to worry about staking beans anymore! :) We had 5 or so meals off the corn, then I picked enough in one batch to can.

Alan and Katie shucked these 36 ears of corn while Savannah and I got a load of green beans going in the pressure canner.

This is a jar of green beans before it went into the canner. I love the vibrant green of the beans and the purple streaks on the Rattlesnake beans.  Unfortunately, that purple streak disappears once they're heated.  I want to do a full post on canning green beans soon.

I've been looking for a real good slicer for the large quantities of food prep I do every year.  I took the plunge and bought this Weston Pro Vegetable Slicer, also known as a mandoline slicer.  I like the sturdiness of it, but I'm not sure if I'm happy of the performance of it.  I've cut cucumbers, onions, corn, cheese, and some other foods which are slipping my mind right now, and have had mixed results.  I will say this though...the very first day I was using it, the food pusher fell apart in my hand.  I called the company to ask about replacement of the food pusher (which I could have super glued back together, but come on! It was the first time I'd used the thing and it was not cheap!), and they sent me a whole new slicer, not just the food pusher. So, now, I have two mandoline slicers. ;)  I was impressed with the company's willingness to work with me and was beyond impressed that they sent me another $55 vegetable slicer just because the cheapest part of the gizmo broke!  As for how it slices corn?  It does pretty well.  It's hard to hold where you won't slice your finger, but I managed to get by unmaimed.

After I cut the corn off the cob, Savannah took a butter knife and scraped the milk off the cob to minimize waste and to give the corn a creamed corn taste.

This was the first gizmo I used to cut the corn off the cob.  Someone recommended this style of cutter, so I bought one.  This particular one broke on the 6th ear of corn.  Thus, the reason for switching over to the Weston slicer.  (I traded this cutter out, which I was just going to exchange for the same style, but they were out, for a Lee's Corn Cutter....not sure I like it either.  I must be hard to please!)

Ain't it purty?

The ears of corn that haven't been scraped are lying down in the bowl; the ones that have been scraped are up against the sides of the bowl.

I packed them in quart jars and ladled boiling water over the corn leaving 1" head space.

I used Tattler Reusable Canning Lids on the corn.  More on that later.  I canned them at 12 lb pressure for 95 minutes once it reached the desired pressure.  I didn't take a picture of them after they came out of the canner.  They're not as pretty anyway. :) The sugar in the corn causes it to turn brown and the corn shrinks up too, leaving a bit more head space than I like.

Onion Relish

I have taken SOO many pictures this summer with intent of blogging, especially about canning.  I'd like to get a fraction of them on the blog! :)  I've really enjoyed canning this year, as I do every year.  It's one of my favorite things to do.  I also love seeing what other people can and getting new ideas.  I've come across several websites that I've enjoyed looking at this year, two of which are Canning Granny and Canning Homemade!.  Since I botched my onion harvest this year, I ended up freezing, dehydrating, and canning my entire harvest.  This recipe is what I did with the last of the onions, which I got from the Canning Granny blog.

Onion Relish

 This recipe was so quick and easy. I followed the recipe just exactly as Canning Granny posted it (this is rare for me).  I put into a pot:


10 cups peeled, chopped onions, which I chopped in my food processor
2 1/4 cups white vinegar
1 cup sugar (I used demerara)
2 T celery seed
2 t salt

 I brought the mixture to a boil, reduced the heat, and let it simmer for 10 minutes.

I packed pint jars, leaving 1/2" head space.

 I put them in my boiling water canner (which is actually my pressure canner here that I was using as a water bath canner), and processed them for 15 minutes at 3,000 ft altitude.

 This relish is good on a hot dog and will also be good on beans.  I'm not sure what else I'd use it in.  Potato salad maybe?  Come to think of it, I think I did increase this recipe just a bit based on the onions I had available. Based on the recipe above, it should have made about 5 pints, and I think I got 7, so I must have increased the recipe to about 14 cups onions and all the rest of the ingredients accordingly.

The Garden

This year has been a very unusual year for the garden.  There have been several factors involved that have made for challenging gardening.  The bugs have been awful due to an unusually warm winter last year.  It's as if none of the bugs died off over winter, making it extremely tough time for trying to grow organically.  The cucumber beetles and squash bugs decimated the squash, zucchini, and cucumber plants.  I got 2 cucumbers (compared to last year's 100's of cucumbers), about 3 zucchini, and maybe 6 yellow squash.  I very well may just take a break from planting those plants for a couple years to see if I can discourage the bugs from hanging out in the garden.  I had a bad year for squash and zucchini last year too due to squash beetles and squash vine borers.  The lack of a huge bounty of these vegetables has made the "canning" season seem much less hectic, which is nice in a way.  We've had plenty to eat with time to either take a break from canning or focus on some of the other foods that tend to get forgotten because I don't have time for it.  For instance, I put away a good variety of peach products including peach pit jelly, blueberry peach jam, peach chunks, and frozen peaches for smoothies and cobblers. I got a semi decent crop of broccoli, but worms just love broccoli. I have to soak it in salt water to get them out, so that kind of discourages me from growing too much of it.  Enough to eat, but not enough to want to freeze a bunch.  I'll leave that to the local commercial farmers that DO spray.  Then I just pick after them. :P

 This is my first year for growing corn since the first year we were married 10 years ago.  I'm just starting to pick and the corn is pretty tasty! I'm not sure if there will be enough to can or freeze any, or if we'll just eat it all fresh.  I'm pleased though with it so far, as I was thoroughly turned off with growing corn 10 years ago.  I grew three varieties, one of which is a pop corn.  I'll be interested to see if we get any poppable corn. :)

 This is the corn as it's just starting to tassle.  The asparagus did extremely well this year; it's on the left hand side of the photo.  With this just being the second year for this patch, I only lightly harvested it this spring, leaving most of the shoots to feed the roots this year.

 Ain't it purty?

 In an effort to save space, I planted the green beans with the corn so the pole beans could grow up the corn.  I've got a late crop of rattlesnake beans coming in, as I had to replant since my blue tips didn't germinate. :(  I just canned my first 7 quarts of green beans yesterday from the few contender beans I planted (a bush variety) that mature before the rattlesnakes.

 The weeds really got ahead of us this year.  It's amazing how quickly that happens.  While you're watering your garden to try to keep the younger tender vegetable plants alive, the weeds are taking all the water!  The kids and I have finally gotten the worst of the weeds after weeks of weeding after rains when the soil is soft.  We spread newspaper and straw down the rows of asparagus and corn.  This provides a weed barrier, a moisture retainer, and a soil enhancer as the newspaper and straw turn to compost!

This is my first year ever growing sweet potatoes.    I didn't know how much room I'd have or how well they would do, so I started with just 25 sweet potato slips.  After sitting in a bowl of water for 6 weeks on the front porch or in the kitchen while I was waiting for the time to plant them and the soil to warm, I really didn't have much hope for them by the time I got them in the ground.  They're doing very well though above the surface.  Who knows what they're doing below the surface.  I also planted yukon gold and kennebec potatoes that are almost ready to harvest.

I had a very good crop (for me) of beets, sugar snap peas, lettuce, and spinach.  We had plenty to eat as well as enough to put a bit away in the freezer for later.  The beets keep well in the fridge, though I do want to try dehydrate some.  We ate all of the greens off the beets as well which are basically the same plant as swiss chard.  I just had no idea.  Thanks, Amanda. ;)

Tomatoes?  Pretty much a bust for long term processing, but we've had some tasty tomato sandwiches and have snacked on plenty of sungold tomatoes and ground cherries.  My herbs did well, but I just didn't use them much this year.

I thought I was going to have a fantastic onion harvest.  But I learned at least two things that I hope I'll never forget.  One, if the onions start blooming, clip the blooms.  All the energy goes into the massive blooms, thereby leaving pathetic onions beneath the surface.  Despite a mostly tiny white onion harvest, I got 46 lbs of onions between the yellow and white onions. Which brings me to number 2.  Never ever EVER trim the greens (leaves) off of the onions at harvest time.  Regardless of whether or not you think you will braid them, the onions need to cure for several weeks before cutting the greens off.  I for some reason forgot that tidbit, which I knew in years past.  (You see, I was trying to be proactive by clipping the greens now rather than waiting and doing it later!)  So, after a couple of weeks of curing in the basement, the onions were rotting.  Rapidly.  I spent three days peeling the rot off the onions and putting them up.  In the end, 1/3-1/2 of the onions were  a loss, but I froze over 2 gallon bags of diced onions, made 6 1/2 pints of onion relish, and dried 4 dehydrators full of onions which resulted in nearly a gallon of packed dried onions.  The upside?  I don't have to peel an onion for months!

Thus far for fall, I have October beans growing and carrots and swiss chard that have germinated. I've planted more beets, radishes, turnips, spinach, and kale.  We'll see how it goes.  I've planted more than I ever plant for a fall garden.  I've always wanted to plant a fall garden, but I'm usually so busy putting up tomatoes, green beans, and other stuff that I don't have time for a fall garden.  I hope it will continue to give us produce well past frost!

Fresh Bouquet

 Savannah picked and arranged this bouquet of flowers for me.  I love how the kids love to pick flowers.  We usually have several bouquets of flowers in the house all summer long.

It All Started with Some Spilled Beet Juice

So, Aaron makes the coffee every morning.  (He makes really good coffee.  I love his coffee almost as much as I love him.  I'm kidding.  But it's very good.)  When he was finished making coffee this morning, he came in the bedroom and told me there was something spilled in the refrigerator...blood or beet juice or something, but it was all over the shelf.   My first thought was, "Ugh, that chicken has had it and it and has bled all over everything".  My second thought was "But I do have some beet greens in there too.  I hope that's it."  And my third thought was, "Boy am I glad I didn't clean the fridge in the past few days like I've been wanting to!"  So,  after the morning chores were finished (dishes, laundry, animal feeding, etc.) I started cleaning out the fridge. I did a pretty deep cleaning of the fridge about 2 months ago, so the fact that I was doing it again so soon is a record for me.  I'm trying to get more regular about this kind of thing.  Well, I was pleased to find that it was indeed beet juice and not chicken blood.  Beet juice is much more appetizing to wipe up and I don't feel like I need to disinfect the whole house when I'm through cleaning the fridge with beet juice.  Despite the fact that I deep cleaned the inside of the fridge not too long ago, it still took me over an hour to clean it out.  And according to my fridge's standards, it was not very full!  I keep pretty good tabs on what food is in the fridge and do a decent job of eating things before they go bad, but there were those few things like a quart jar of pepper juice from last year's canning that I decided I just was never going to use.  And those two lime slices that must have been sliced about 2 months ago.  I also cleaned off the door and those cubbies which is something I didn't do last time.

Then I decided to clean the outside of the fridge.  Oh my word.  How can something get so dirty without me noticing it?  And the magnets and photos and refrigerator art that accumulate!  And then there was the top.  It had been QUITE sometime since I'd cleaned off the top. Like 2?  years?  Talk about stuff accumulating.  It was bad.  And last but not least, UNDER the fridge.  I used to clean under the fridge about once a year, but I believe it's been about 3 years since I've pulled the sucker out.  People, in addition to the three HUGE handfuls of dust that I just picked up with my hands and put in the trash can, it filled. up. my bagless vacuum cleaner that I emptied just prior to cleaning under the fridge.  I took the front grate off (CLEANED IT! GROSS!), unscrewed the cardboard backing, and sucked up all the distgustingness  that I could get.  I was literally blown away at how much dust and dirt there was.  It is a miracle that thing was/is still running!  But buddy, over 6 hours later, my refrigerator, both inside and out are clean.  (But not even the freezer!)  I would take a picture if I weren't so lazy.

All the while, Savannah requested to clean the bathrooms, so with toothbrush, sponge, and vinegar water in hand, the girl cleaned both bathrooms minus the inside of the toilets AND mopped the floors.  She's such a gal.

Oh. Oh! And guess what? I swept the kitchen floor twice and  mopped it.  That doesn't happen very often either.  That's the only reason why I'm sitting to write right now.  The floor is wet, so I can't fix supper.  It's probably dry now, so I should go check.