Homemaking

Yes, it’s a little early, but we have the garden started. I wanted to make sure the pepper plants got big enough to produce some fruit before it gets cold in the fall, so I started them early. This is what they looked like in early September; now they are outside in our “greenhouse”, so I don’t see them every day.

I set out Bok Choi, kohlrabi, broccoli and cauliflower that I started, the other day when we had a warm spell. It’s turned cold and rainy now, but the little plants look great, at least what I can see of them from the kitchen window (the middle window you can see in this picture; the window on the left is a bedroom, and the one on the right is the laundry). Mr. Sweetie had fun with my camera while I was transplanting.

Little Miss had fun crawling around on the grass while I worked in the garden.

Mr. Imagination had fun running in the dirt, and Mr. Intellectual was working on a project.

Mr. Inventor’s ducks have been eating the lettuce and Swiss Chard that I had growing, so we informed him last week that his ducks would be locked out of the yard/garden, or eaten. He got busy putting up a duck-proof fence, and then herded them out.

Here is the beautiful tom turkey again. I know I’ve posted a lot of pictures of him—I love watching him display!

Mr. Imagination on the trampoline.

Mr. Imagination picked me a bouquet of daffodils!

These ducks wanted back in the yard!

We are getting close to the end of harvesting food for the year. Gayle and the boys are digging potatoes today. That is quite different from last year! It was so wet last year that there was water in every hole made by the fork when they dug up a potato plant. About half the crop rotted in the ground, and I had to deal with rotten potatoes in the bin all winter. Yuck! This year, the soil is bone-dry! We’re hoping for heavy rains soon, though, so Gayle decided it was time to get them dug.

The shelves in the jar room are very nearly full. The freezers are mostly full—even the “new” one we bought to put a steer in in another two weeks is a third full! Onions are braided and hanging beside the jars of food, and the pumpkins are piled in there and on a porch. We won’t go hungry this year!

Our garden this year has produced spectacularly! As usual, I took pictures early on, with full intentions of taking more when it was at its peak, and as usual, I never got follow-up pictures taken. We, specifically the boys, have put up bushels of produce—we will have all the pickles, of three varieties, that we want, plus 95 pounds of sourkraut and about that much plain cabbage in the freezer; lots of zucchini; all the lettuce we can eat, and so far what looks like a great crop of tomatoes coming on. The onions are nearly ready to harvest, and we’ve canned a great many green beans and carrots. The potatoes have a blight, but we’re eating a lot now. Corn was too dry, and crowded out by too many pumpkins in the patch.

The early garden, in mid-December:

Corn and pumpkins, with tomatoes to the left and potatoes beyond them.

Cabbage, cukes, beans.

Carrots, radishes, beets, peas, lettuce

The entire garden, in the process of being weeded for the first time.  Below is a mound across the creek, on which we planted zucchini and pumpkins. Failure! Too dry.

Tomatoes fill up this small garden.

Peppers are up against the house, by the lemon tree.

We filled in this space around the rhubarb plants with tomatoes, tomatillos, Cape Gooseberries (like ground cherries), and zucchini.

I did get two pictures recently! This was the day we pulled up all the rest of the cabbage. This one head of Savoy Cabbage was so pretty I got a picture of it.

I’ve learned that one way to save space in the garden is to plant the cabbages very close. They can be 1 foot from each other, in every direction, and thrive. No weed problems there!

We had several wheelbarrow loads of cabbage that day, and ended up with three bushels when it was all trimmed. I read aloud a very exciting story while the boys trimmed it, and the cow loved eating all the “waste”.

When we thinned the carrots, the boys were happy to find some funny ones:

All in all, we’re feeling quite blessed with this year’s garden.

First, I want to wish all of you a wonderful 2015! We’ve had a lovely New Year’s Day today. It’s a lot cooler than yesterday, which I appreciate, but sunny and beautiful. I went out to the garden this morning and found a lot of things ready to pick. We are eating well these days!

This afternoon, I went to the garage to get something, and made a side trip to check on the barrel of apple cider vinegar I’ve been brewing since last March. One of the boys had gotten a small cup of it this morning, and it tasted just slightly weaker than the double-strength vinegar we usually buy from a stockfeeds store. He thought there was a scoby in it (like kombucha). I looked, and sure enough there was a huge “mother” floating  on top!

That was exciting. There were also a lot of fruit flies in it, so I decided it was time to strain and bottle all of it. We ended up with 21 liters, just over 5 gallons, for the price of a rubbish bin (maybe $15). The apples were free from the roadside, and the only other ingredient was water. To buy that much vinegar at the stockfeeds shop costs about $80. I’m pleased with this experiment!

I put the “mother” in a jar to save till I start the next batch, so hopefully it will work even faster than this batch. Sure looks ugly! It’s kind of rubbery, a lot like a kombucha scoby.

Esther wanted to see what the cows would do with the vinegary apples, so she dumped them out in the paddock. They wanted to eat them, but the acid was apparently kind of hard for them to handle. They keep coming back for more, though!