Right Now . . .

Flowers that say "August" to me, like this Black-Eyed Susan, are starting to bloom around the yard.


We have hit the tipping point where harvesting has begun to far outweight time allotted for garden maintenance. And the weeds . . . they appear to be winning. But that's only when you're looking at the garden from a distance, if you peek between the weeds, you will find great big onions seemingly pushing themselves out of the ground, tomatoes that are at the point of super pale green, getting ready to blush to red any day now. And the sweet corn; the sweet corn makes up for the pitful showing of the green beans.

I haven't done a good job of counting how many dozen ears we have picked, but we know that we have frozen about 25 pint bags of it, eaten a dozen or so fresh, and given a few ears away. And there is still a lot more to pick. So I may be finding new recipes to use corn in this winter, and go more sparingly on the green beans.

The ears may not win any prizes at the county fair, but they're good-sized and sweet, and to us that's all that really matters.

All this preserving seems time consuming, and some days I would like to pretend that there aren't dozens of ears of sweet corn to freeze or pounds of green beans to snap and can, or cucumbers to pickle. To feel footloose and fancy free in July and August, in this household . . . not going to happen. But it all pays off later, when instead of going to the grocery store I just hit up the freezer or shelves in the basement, and have all the ingredients I need to make a nourishing, satisfying meal.

Kitchen Invasion

We've entered the season here on the farm where horizontal space to set something down on in the kitchen is at a premium. This is because pretty much all available space is invaded occupied by produce waiting to be or in some step of being processed or preserved. At the moment we have: a sink full of snapped green beans waiting for the dishwasher to finish sterilizing jars for canning, 6 cabbages waiting to be made into freezer slaw, cole slaw, or whatever other recipes we can find to use it. Yellow squash and zucchini waiting to be  frozen, eaten or sold. You get the picture. And we haven't even hit tomato season yet :)

(This big one was a 6 pounder! We got two meals out of it. Yum!!!)



Outside . . . the sweet corn is getting tall, trying to compete with the neighbors field corn.

The calves search for shade, and good stuff to eat. Here they're enjoying the shade of the apple tree, on a pile of loose hay/grass cuttings we picked up from Ryan's sister's field.

As always, the cherry tomatoes are getting ready to over produce . . . I learned my lesson, and we only planted one of these super stars this year:

While this abundance can be overwhelming when it comes to cooking and preserving . . . in the long run it's worth it. Healthy, homegrown food, just waiting for its turn at our table. So very, very blessed.



In the Growing Business

Here in our corner of the world, we've got some serious growing going on. As in vegetables, weeds, berries, and poultry.


After a slow start, our Cole crops and peas have taken off, and as they are wont to do, are all producing copious amounts at the same time. So there is a constant flow of some kind of vegetable in our fridge waiting to either be made into supper or cut up, blanched, and frozen for suppers later this year.

Our first couple years of gardening together, our broccoli wasn't much to get excited about. Even this year, we set almost 20 plants in the ground, and lost almost half of them. But the half that survived are going gangbusters, thank goodness! We eat a lot of broccoli around here:

Last week, I dug a few potatoes to have new potatoes for supper. Mostly just to see what was hiding out under all those hills in the garden:

The short row of early planted potatoes that these came from is already dying back this week. Which was kinda our intent, to have a red potato crop to dig and eat when green beans started coming on.


Speaking of . . . never mention in front of a vegetable plant how very dependable that plant is, and how you always have so much produce from that plant, etc. , etc.  It will turn and laugh at you! Not literally, but a couple of weeks ago I was saying that about our green beans. Now three-quarters of our green beans are infected with some fungus or bacteria and are losing leaves. And while still showing that they will make a comeback, and even putting on flowers and pods. They will be behind, and less this year.  Not matching the new potato harvesting plan I had thought, or my predictions about how you can always count on green beans to produce if nothing else.


I mourned the end of strawberry season, which seemed short, and not nearly bountiful enough. Though really can there ever be enough strawberries? Luckily black raspberry season was right on its tail, and the weather that didn't really work for strawberries seems to have done well by raspberries. We have picked several quarts over the last couple of weeks, and for the first time in a few years I made some black raspberry freezer jam:

Believe it or not I did sieve some of the seeds out of the pulp before I made it into jam; though you wouldn't guess by looking at those jars. There are still a lot of berries out there to be picked, but they are drying up fast with this hot weather and no rain.