Tally HO! And in the Kitchen August 1, 2009

Tally HO! And in the Kitchen

August 1, 2009 at 2:20 pm

WOWSERS! The tally for July is in and a big surprise!
Eggs, 102, which is down a bit from previous months. That isn’t really a surprise, since it has been so hot, the hens have been in a bit of a moult, which always lowers production.
alfalfa & comfrey, which I grow for the rabbits and chickens: 4.8 pounds
Produce: 101.75 That is the big surprise. The bulk of the poundage has been potatoes, tomatoes and onions, but includes strawberries, several kinds of beans, swiss chard, tomatillos, peppers, cucumbers, Tromboccino squash, eggplant, basil, apples, watermelon, mesquite beans [which will be ground into a flour when really crispy dry,  high in protien with a sweet lemon taste] and baby corn.
And there is more to come. It has been too hot for the lima beans to set pods, but as soon as it cools off a bit I think we’ll have lots, the cukes and yard long beans are just now hitting their stride. The baby corn is just coming in, to the girls delight [they've been waiting all summer for baby corn and are eating it raw!] The Kabocha squash will probably tote up a lot of poundage, there’s the yellow Moon & Stars and the Jubilee watermelons, the cantaloupes, a couple of kinds of pole beans, peppers and eggplants, to say nothing of the fact that there are still potatoes in their pots.  While it’s been too hot for the large paste tomatoes to set new fruit, once the daytime temps stay under 90, they should set a lot.
So it is quite possible for Aug and Sept to show even more poundage than July.
Each time I go to the grocery store my list gets shorter and shorter, partly due to the produce coming in from the garden. Part of it is because I am making more and more things from scratch at home. For instance milk was very cheap when I went shopping yesterday so I picked up an extra gallon and it is ‘ripening’ right now to make cottage cheese. I have found a really delicious brand of yogurt and while I am also going to begin making my own, especially when milk is cheap, it was on sale too so I got extra. The extra carton is now draining to make ‘yogurt cheese’. This is a soft and creamy spreadable ‘cheese’ to which I will add fresh herbs and eat on crackers.
Peelings, cores and bruised bits of apples sit in a gallon jar becoming vinegar. The cucumber crop is in various jars becoming fermented dill pickles. Scott eats tons of mayo so that is another one I’ll start making at home. He also loves garlic and I have a garlic mayo recipe to try out on him.
I’ve really been disappointed with BBQ sauce and salad dressings since I started really reading labels. Also with ketchup. They all have tons of corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup in them along with chemicals I can’t pronounce.  This makes most of them way too sweet and of course any non organic corn product is likely to be genetically modified, something I don’t want to eat. So I have been experimenting with making my own sauces. One really good one has been garlic & ginger. When I get it tweaked just right I’ll post it here.

It just keeps on growing July 15, 2009

It just keeps on growing

July 15, 2009 at 3:51 pm

The warm nights especially have everything in a growth spurt. It’s beginning to look like a jungle around here!
An apple of unknown variety.
In spite of the earlier rodent attack, the cantaloupes on the compost pile are making a come back. This one will be ready soon.
A view of the back garden, with hollyhocks and sunflowers.
These are Polish Linquisa paste tomatoes. Almost ready for makin’ sauce!
That roque squash plant turns out to be a Kabocha.
A yard long bean. They do love the heat.
Double Yield cucumbers from www.freedomseeds.com are bloomin up a storm
Huckleberries. I’ve never grown this before. They are loaded with fruit and while it is black it doesn’t seem to be ready to pick yet.
The front yard grain patch. In the front the small seeded sunflowers are beginning to bloom. In the back ground the bloody butcher corn, popping sorhgum and broom corn.
This is the raspberry bed that was overseeded to buckwheat. I discovered I probably planted the buckwheat too thick and with the heat it was taking a lot of water to keep it from wilting. So I pulled it up, picked off a few ripe seeds and laid it back down, along with the wild sunflowers, as mulch for the raspberries. We will probably have more buckwheat and sunflowers later on when the monsoon gets around to giving up some rain.
The moon & stars watermelon plants are taking off and outgrowing their little cages.
No Vacancy. The new rabbit condo is full with our 4 does in place. When the weather cools off I’ll build another like it for the 2 bucks, which will also give me space to hold fryers over if I need to.
The greywater filter tub, with canna lilly, elephant ears and kabocha squash.
The Jicama are really taking off now that it is really hot. I just don’t know why the leaves are scorching like this.
More ‘maters. These are the Imur Prior Beta, nice 1 ounce fruits.
The yellow peppers are Rio Grande, with a nice mild heat. There are some green bells hiding in the back ground.

what’s new around here June 27, 2009

what’s new around here

June 27, 2009 at 3:21 pm 

Well lots of things have been growing on, here’s a few pics from the last week or so.
Miracles terrific sunflower is blooming. It is now 8 feet 6 inches tall.
The small fruited tomatoes are loaded. These are the Princepe Borhese. But the kids and I eat them as fast as they come in so we haven’t gotten around to drying any of them yet.
The new bunny condo in the works. This one will hold my four does. Later I will make another one for the two bucks with space for two more grown rabbits or to hold fryers that don’t gain weight fast enough and need a little more time to grow. I suspect that rabbit will replace chicken in our diet this winter.
The small seeded sunflower plants are beginning to really take off and grow.
The King of the Garden lima’s are beginning to bloom at the bottom. The tops of the vines are hitting 9 feet and still going.
WHOA! HELLO THERE! I came around the corner of the house the other evening to discover this guy on my patio. It looked like this rattlesnake had just eaten [big belly bulge visible just past the coffee can]. I hope it was that pesky squirrel! I hated to do it after it did me such a favor, but I did shoot it. With small children around the house it was way too risky to let it keep hanging out, especially just a few feet from the back door.

Pesky Critters June 17, 2009

Pesky Critters

June 17, 2009 at 1:11 pm

Grrrr!First a mouse was eating the bean and sunflower seeds right out of the soil blocks in the house. Then the birds were pulling up young seedlings outside. Then a rat ate some of the pepper plants to the ground, just as they were blooming. Now a blasted rabbit has been eating up the cantaloupes and blue jays are stealing the tomatoes! Very Very aggravating!
I did get some bird netting over the strawberry bed and finally got a couple more strawberries [the jays steal them before they even turn pink!] Today I’ll be getting some more netting to put over the tomatoes. I’m not sure how to solve the rabbit problem as the melons are growing on the compost and there’s so much junk sitting around up there it would be hard to put up a fence…..

From a 3 year old May 12, 2009

From a 3 year old

May 12, 2009 at 4:33 am

My 3 year old grand daughter is the self appointed rabbit feeder and helps feed and water every day she is here. A couple of weeks ago she was giving our buck too much feed and I told her he doesn’t need so much, we don’t want him to get fat. She then thought that she shouldn’t feed the doe and litter of fryers too much either. So then I had to explain that we wanted them to get fat so we could eat them. Ever since then she tells me almost every day “Right grandma, we want them to get fat so we can eat them?”
Well we ate some for dinner last night and all three girls thought they were delicious and had seconds.

In the garden…. May 8, 2009

In the garden….

May 8, 2009 at 5:25 am

In the Garden things are growing & changing. When you see pictures of gardens you must realize that they are just a fleeting moment captured in the life of that garden. No other day or hour will it look exactly like that again because a garden is a living, breathing, growing life form, which also contains many other living, growing breathing life forms. Even if we weren’t working on making changes and improvements to the garden all the time, it would be different every day or two.
A beautiful pink poppy. The bees are always loving these big poppies as soon as they open in the morning because they are full of pollen.
The chickens have been working over this area for several months now. When we cut down a big evergreen this is where I had piled all the little branches too small for firewood. That yellow thing is my little electric chipper/shredder and now I’m shredding up the bigger stuff that the chickens haven’t eaten or broken up. When done, the area where the chickens are will become a new garden area and the chickens will go back on the other side of the tree for the summer where they will get more shade during the hot part of the day.
Well, ‘ol Stumpy is gone, thank goodness. this is the pile of chunks and roots we dug and cut out. There are actually some more roots in the way of finishing off this area, but I can only get so much done at a time.
Well that first green tomato is getting really big and now it has company.
A new view from the patio, this is looking back towards the greenhouse, which now has no plastic on it. You can see all the roots there on top of the wall we pushed over getting the stump out.That whole area will become more greenhouse eventually.
The Baby blue Hubbards are thriving on the compost pile. That thermometer says 160 degrees!
Since the days have been 85 to almost 90 I took the old windows off those watermelon & cantaloupe seedlings growing on the other compost pile. The watermelons are running already.
The bunnies are _almost_ big enough to be BBQ. Yes, I eat rabbits. Rabbit meat is like the breast meat of chicken, only all over. Also it has almost no fat and is higher in protein per  pound of meat than chicken, so it’s even better for you than chicken meat.
Two of my grand daughters pull the tops off the carrots and feed them to the bunnies. The rabbits and chickens are integral parts of my plan for self sufficiency. The rabbits eat a lot of greens, prunings from the roses, fruit trees and brambles and produce meat and manure. The chickens eat up a lot of spoiling food and table scraps and make eggs and manure. The manure from both helps raise earthworms which are good food for the chickens as well as making great compost to help our garden grow even better.