Ugh, Winter

I've been trying to think of a different title for this post, but just can't! Looking at the almost empty, frozen garden and greenhouse, it's hard not to feel a little sad. The growing season flew by and it looks like all the hard work has just disappeared. It doesn't help that I was out of town for the little bit of Fall we did have, as it seems winter has nestled in to stay and it's not even Thanksgiving! Ugh, Winter!

Just a few months ago, I could barely shimmy through the greenhouse, now I could almost do cartwheels!



And the garden was producing so much I could hardly keep up with it. Now Bear can barely find anything to dig up and eat anymore! (can you find Bear in this picture??)



OK, I'll stop lamenting what we don't have and focus on what we do have-let's stay in the garden.

We still have a load of broccoli, just like we did last year, it seems magical to me! This year we also still have beets, turnips, parsnips, leeks, salad and cooking greens. Since almost every night it is getting down in the 20s and for the number of days that haven't made it out of the 30s, I'm pretty happy with that!




The greenhouse looks really empty, but there is promise of a winter garden just getting started out there! Winter greens and salad greens have already been seeds and are sprouting. I also transplanted a bunch of salad greens into a hanging planter, so hopefully we'll be having big salads sooner rather than later! Hopefully when Keith gets home this afternoon, we'll be moving the cold frames into the greenhouse, speeding up the growth of the little sprouts!




And what did we do with everything that the garden produced? It's been canned, or frozen, or is in cold storage. The pantry overflowing with both sweet and savory choices like plum butter, red wine pickled beets, roasted garlic pizza sauce, and huckleberry jam. Not too shabby! And the freezer is full of blanched veggie mixes ready to be popped in soups or stir-fried.



Cold storage is a new experiment and with everything that we had a the end of the season, I had to try it! So, with buckets loaded with root veggies and damp sand living in the shop in the garage, we're going to see how long we get keep all this preserved!




Alright, so we have a lot and still a lot more to do to get everything ready to make it through winter. Today is a beautiful day and it's time to get to work. So I guess I'll stop writing this and go haul a bunch of goat poo to the compost piles! Glamourous, I know!

So, this was a little unexpected

I thought I had one big failure in the garden this summer: potatoes. So much so, there are really no pictures. I really didn't expect this.

I tried the 'straw method' for growing them this year, which mean that I placed my seed potatoes in my prepped raised bed full of rich soil, then covered them with a few inches of straw. As the plants got bigger, I added more straw, until there was a foot to 18 inches of straw above where the taters were planted.

At first this looked great! The plants were growing like crazy, looking healthy, and I just kept piling on the straw. Then it stated raining. It never, well almost never, rains in the summer here and then we get these crazy deluges of rain. Here is a con of the straw method-it doesn't really drain water very well and makes is a fungus breading ground. My bed of potatoes became a text book example of late blight and I fought it! It wasn't severe and I kept spraying (organic) fungicides and changing the watering cycle to improve the situation. The plants started looking a little better.

I was going to take pictures of my beautiful late blight when we got back from a weekend out of town, but while we were gone we had a hard frost and it looked there was nothing in my potato bed but soaking wet straw. Great, wonderful, adding insult to injury, thanks frost!

There was a break in the rain today, so it seemed like a good time to see if there were any taters to salvage and too clean out the bed of straw. I brought out a little bucket...then had to go get another bucket.

Wow, 40 pounds of potatoes later, I'm still shocked! I pulled back the first of the straw and there were huge taters staring back at me and then more, and then more. Buy the end, I was a soaking wet, muddy mess (of course it started raining again!), but really didn't care. I just wanted to get inside to weigh my windfall of potatoes!

So in the pile of taters there are Yukon Golds and Purple Vikings (just purple on the outside, white on the inside).


I'm following the Oregon State extension office tips for storing home grown potatoes. I've washed them and now I'm letting them dry before putting them in a small room upstairs where I can control the humidity with my trusty humidifier, that I will greatly miss the next few nights.

I'm almost certain this should be enough potatoes to last us a long while! If dinner wasn't already going on the stove, I'd be making gnocchi right now! I'm not sure if I'm sold on the straw method, but I'm not sure what I'd try next year either! We'll see!

Holy Jalapenos!

While my tomatoes are taking their sweet time getting ripe, I have been inundated with an insane number of peppers. My jalapeno plants look like they're about to fall over with the weight of all their peppers. I was hoping to be making tons of salsa, but with 5 times more peppers than tomatoes, I had to figure something else out.

Then Keith has a suggestion: Pickle them!

I do not like anything pickled, not a single thing. But, sure, why not! I've never really tried to pickle anything before. So I find this recipe online for Escabeche or the pickled jalapenos you sometimes get a Mexican restaurants and got to harvesting all the ingredients.

I pulled out a bunch of fresh carrots and had some onions and garlic ready to go. I chopped all them to the tune of Bear and BJ crunching on the carrot ends.



I thought harvesting all the jalapenos for this would put a dent in the thick bush of peppers. After picking 32 of them (more than the 1 lb the recipe calls for!), I can say, nope, not even close!



I just followed the instructions. Fried up the veg, then added apple cider vinegar with all the spices. It was a pretty fast and easy canning day!





Keith better freaking love these! We've got 6 jars of this and the whole house, including me, smells spicy and vinegary!



With the number of Anchos, Anaheim's, and jalapenos I still have, I think a chile sauce like this is going to be next-but at least quadrupled!!

See what you've stared Yutoku!

Engulfed by the garden

Where has the summer gone!? It feels like just last week I was planning the summer garden, now I'm overwhelmed by it.

With Keith's sister Michelle here for most of the summer, I was worried that what I had planned in the garden wouldn't be enough for three people. I did not take two things into consideration 1) We have all the raised beds completed and ready to go for the summer and 2) Michelle wasn't actually here all summer! Crap! I may have over done things a bit.

While picking green beans, I was thinking that this was the year of the Great Green Bean Explosion, but that is not quite right. It is actually the August of the Great green bean, snap pea, snow pea, carrot, broccoli, beet, turnip, onion, pepper, eggplant, zucchini Explosion.

It is looking like it's going to be the September of the Great tomato, melon, winter squash, rutabaga, parsnips, kohlrabi, plus everything listed above Explosion. To deal with this I have already ripped out 2 zucchini plants (mental note 6 summer squash/zucchini plants are about 4 TOO MANY!). These are from just one day...


But I am loving that we have had all the raised beds up and going this year! The garden as a whole is looking beautiful! We even have our drip system set up in all the beds, which means I do not have hand water any of this! Love it! Love it! Love it!




The greenhouse is a bit of a jungle. I'd better stay my small self to ensure that I can actually move around in there!



Right now, I am learning that maybe 15 winer squash plants are a few too many, same with a dozen melon plants. Maybe I don't need a whole row of eggplant plants, but maybe I do! We'll see how this all ends! I see a lot of drying, freezing and generally a lot of preservation in my future.




Now is the time for a few introductions. We have two new kids (goat kids, people!)-Franny and Snowy. And then there's Meatball, our lamb that will only be with us until October, if you get my drift.

This is Snowy. It's hard to get a shot of her since she is ALWAYS licking my legs, or really anyones legs.


Franny, full name Francis De Young, striking a pose.


And Meatball, just being adorably funny looking.


And just in case you can only think of Bear as the adorable puppy that he was, here is now and the goofy, adorable one year old that he is now.



So, who wants to come over for dinner?

Make way for ducklings!

First, I would like to apologize for the last post: it was a glitch, a fluke, an accident. And it was about 3 times longer, with a bunch more pictures and such, but somehow all that disappeared. Basically it was wallpaper, blah, blah, wallpaper. If you want to see any pictures, there are all in the flickr photo-stream on the right.

We just keep getting more creatures! This time in addition to a few more baby chicks, we've gotten ducklings. Chicks are cute, but really, ducklings are so much cuter-and bigger! than baby chicks!
   

When I left Chicks Days at Grain Growers, I thought I had 4 Pekin ducks, 2 Rouens, and 2 I have no ideas. They had ordered a random assortment of ducklings, so even the folks at Grain Growers weren't too sure what they had. After doing a little research I think I actually have 2 Rouens, 2 Pekins, 2 Buffs, a Blue Swedish and either a Welsh Harlequin or a third Buff. So that's not bad right, I'm really only uncertain about one of them... we'll see in time!




So what, you ask, are we going to do with these ducklings. Mostly keep them for eggs. The eggs are larger than chicken eggs and ohh! they make delicious, rich cakes!

We also got a few more chicks. Most of this little ladies are white egg layers (Leghorns) and two more Americanas, who lay green eggs.



We already have 2 Americanas and they have not laid an egg all winter. About a week ago, they started laying again. At that point I realized something unexpected: I had just painted the kitchen Americana egg green, subconsciously? I have no idea!



And just for fun, here is Bear and Fang taking a nap at the side door. Happy Spring!

Winter Projects

Wallpaper can suck it! edition

I keep meaning to post, but we have been a little busy with self inflicted house projects.

Let's start upstairs, in the incredibly ugly bathroom. There are no pictures of how this room originally looked-why document it!? That's how ugly it was. I thought I had some evidence of all of us taking the wallpaper down, but I can't even find those! There was Rich, Beth, Keith, me, and sometimes BJ in the bathroom ripping down paper, an inch at a time. The only room I had any help taking down paper, it was amazing! There was beige and maroon flowered paper, then a layer of paint-EVIL!-then the original layer of rubber duckies in sailboats paper. Why! Children's wallpaper-are your kids going to be 5 forever!?!

The walls were kind of destroyed, but we hired a friend to fix them and fix them he did.


As I was painting this room, I kept thinking the color (pompanion pink), looked like somewhere familiar. Finally I got it, YOU are the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker. The creepy bathroom from Shining (OK, one of the creepy bathrooms from the Shining)! Not to freak out future guests, that is not what it looks like with new mirrors, fixtures, pretty much anything that wasn't nailed down.