It’s been a couple of weeks since we recorded the video for this, and since then, the beans have expired and we have begun harvesting the beets, turnips, and some greens. This was a weird year for many people and our summer garden was a little blah, as well. But our fall garden looks great so far!
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We spend winter looking forward to warmer days, dreaming of a garden that reflects the beauty in the seed catalogs we pour through. Even while it’s still cold out, the much-awaited time comes for spring planting.
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When I saw the Christmas pole lima bean in Baker Creek’s catalog, it reminded me of the beautiful, marbled limas my amazing grandma grew. Since our oldest loves lima beans, it was definitely worth a try. Next, we needed a pole bean trellis.
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We have reduced the varieties of vegetables we’re growing by about 40. But we still have 60-70 varieties we’re growing this year. I’ll share with you today how we buy and organize our seeds.
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A crisp, clean, white chicken coop is beautiful to behold. With dust, mud, dirty chickens and animal foot traffic on a farm, they don’t stay that way for long. Once a year, we like to freshen up the chicken coop limewash. We’ll show you how we do it and give you a tour of the coop in the process.
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You might say sweet potatoes are glorious! And that would be fitting for this relative of the morning glory. They are another way God provides a delicious, nutritious vegetable that can be stored fresh for months. Let’s see how we did with our sweet potato harvest.
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The weather is finally starting to feel like fall. I love that we can open the windows and freshen up the air in the house. But, I know it won’t be long before it gets too cold for that. The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a cold and snowy winter for us. Truly, I love that, as well! But being closed up in the house or work or school more means germs will be more readily shared. Today, we are going to make Fire Tonic from The Herbal Handbook for Homesteaders by Abby Artemesia. It takes several weeks of sitting in the pantry to be fully ready, so now’s the time to prepare our herbal medicine cabinet and get our immunity boosted.
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We’ve talked about a number of ways to preserve foods when in season so we can enjoy them for months to come — canning, freezing, fermenting. Today we’ll talk about drying or dehydrating. You can dehydrate many foods for longer shelf-stable storage, even things you might not think of. Not only fruits and vegetables but also meat (think jerky), dairy or eggs. And there are a variety of ways to dehydrate foods using the sun, the air, the oven or a dehydrator. Today we’re making dried tomatoes stored in oil using our dehydrator.
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Peach season might be over where you are, but you still have plenty of time to make some delicious peachy recipes with the peaches you froze earlier in the season. This last episode in our peachy series of What’s in the Mason Jar gives us a sweet change to the usual. Peach corn salsa combines a few of summer’s special garden treats to make a sweet and spicy choice for chips or fish tacos, so great any time of the year.
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This is our first year growing potatoes. Besides sweet potatoes, which aren’t ready yet, we grew three varieties of white potatoes. Red Cloud and Dark Red Norland are red-skinned varieties and Carola is a yellow potato (check out our August newsletter). We tried to get a russet variety, but the farm we ordered from didn’t have a good supply. Which is just fine with us, since red and yellow (and purple) are our favorite varieties anyhow. Let’s see how we did with our potato harvest.
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