The tail end of summer is roaring past me at ridiculous speed. We opted to skip the ‘big’ fair this year– it costs so much!– but had a great time going to a church carnival on Saturday. They had 50-cent hot dogs, corn dogs, burgers, ice cream, snow cones and cotton candy, if you...
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My lunch today. From the store: watermelon From the garden: tomatoes, cukes, canteloupe, and CORN! Also: this french bread - it has a secret!
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This morning we headed out the the garden to see what was going on: apparently a lot more than I realized.  We spent probably an hour picking, and then came back into the house to do something with all of our bounty. First on the agenda was sweet relish.  The kids diced about a...
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It’s begun already. Earlier it seems than most years. I’m awash in zucchini. I vowed to pick them tiny, I really did. It’s so much easier to pick/eat/give away 6-inch zucchinis than 18-inch monsters.  But then we went camping and came back to plants that had gone berserk in our absence.   John and I...
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When we first moved to our place in the country, the landscaping consisted of a hillside full of weeds, a good-sized rock pile, and a bedraggled wild rose that still today ekes out a living on our ditch bank. We dreamed of trees, huge ones, shady and rustling in the wind.  So whenever we...
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What my hubby and 6 of my kids did this afternoon More details
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A few of you asked to see our pantry after all the canning. My kitchen is not especially huge, but I’m lucky to have a really nice-sized pantry. The space is triangle-shaped, with two sides of the triangle taken up with deep shelving and the third side of the triangle being double doors for...
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This week we have devoted a few hours to freezing some of our abundant corn crop.  It’s a fairly simple project, but after three people in two days asked me how we do this, I thought it might be worth offering a brief tutorial here. Start by husking the corn and removing all the...
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This past week I have been sucked into the garden/canning vortex. We’ve been given free picking rights to a friend’s apricot and plum trees. Plus the garden is exploding: cukes, peppers, zucchini, corn, and the beginnings of the tomato crop. Saturday yielded a couple dozen each of cucumbers, corn, and tomatoes, enough to overload...
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You might remember that this spring we got 18 chickens with the plan of having a flock of egg-layers. The feed store only had straight run chicks, so we figured we’d just make chicken dinner out of whatever roosters we happened to get. Well, roosters we had in abundance. Loud ones. And for those...
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