Garden Update: 7-16-09

I'm giving away two OFF! mosquito products. Check it out while you are here!



After 4 weeks with NO rain, finally it has rained. In fact we received lots of rain on Monday and small showers every day since. My plants are thrilled. Last Thursday, our figs started ripening, so we've been harvesting a bowl full each day since then. We are snacking on them, dehydrating some and making preserves out of the rest. I've had my first run-in with squirrels this week. There are tons of squirrels around here and they obviously enjoy figs. I find the little furry thieves in the trees often and also find lots of half-eaten figs all over the ground throughout the yard. So far, they are not biting into all of the figs, so I'm not ready to declare war or anything - I'm happy to share, as long as they leave us our share :) .

The garden has not been on my mind as much this last week or so, since we started preserving our farmer's market purchases with more determined effort. In fact, between that, cooking our regular meals, homeschooling (yes, we school even during the summer, though in a much more relaxed manner), an entire day of errands in a nearby city and staying up way too late a few nights this week watching netflix movies, I am exhausted. In fact, I think I'm taking the day off today, outside of cooking dinner, and maybe some cookies. :) Yay! Vacation ;) (Tangent over - back to the garden update)



After it became obvious that our watermelon plant was not going to recover from the heat, we planted seeds (open pollinating variety) and they came up during the week. The plants are so cute and now I need to figure out where to plant them. I don't know if there is still enough "summer' left for them, but since we don't usually get our first frost until November, I figured it couldn't hurt to try.


Our blueberry plant has definitely come back from the brink. New leaves are sprouting every day.

Lemons are looking good and I'm hoping they will start to ripen soon as I'm not sure the poor tree can handle much more weight, lol.


Still harvesting cherry tomatoes, basil, and parsley. I'm hoping to make a basil/ parsley pesto today to use in our dinner (pizza with pesto for the sauce and sliced tomatoes (such beautiful farmer's market tomatoes) and mozzarella).

Its time to figure out what to do for a fall container garden. I'm going to work on that this week and post my thoughts (hopefully) next week.

Visit How Does Your Garden Grow hosted by A High And Noble Calling to read more garden updates, and if you have a garden and a blog, you can participate, too!

Bzzzz Agent: Product Review and Giveaway: Off! Clip on and Off! Power Pad

Bzzzz Agent sent me an Off! Power Pad Lamp and Off! Clip On to try so that I could review them. The Off! Power Pad Lamp works by placing the attractive "lamp" on a table or any other flat surface. The heat activated repellent pad is said to protect a 15X15 foot area and offer the same protection as 15 citronella candles. These lamps are convenient for summer activities like a cookout, back yard swimming or other water activities and also for camping as well as many other activities. The Off! Clip On is in my opinion an unique product. You wear the little battery operated fan with refillable pad clipped to your belt (or you can set it on a table near you) and it protects you from mosquitoes for up to 12 hours. I like the idea of not needing to spray bug spray on my kids to keep mosquitoes at bay.

I will be giving away one Off! Power Pad Lamp to one blog reader and one Off! Clip On to another blog readers. There are several ways you can be entered into the random drawing. 1. Leave a comment on this post. 2. Subscribe to this blog then leave a second comment telling me that you are a subscriber. If you already subscribe be sure to comment, too. 3. Spread the word about this giveaway by blogging, twitter or telling your friends, then leave a third comment letting me know you've spread the word.

I will choose two random numbers and award the corresponding commentors with either the Power Pad Lamp or Clip On. Since these items are somewhat large and will require significant postage, I am going to limit participation to United States residents. I will close the comments to this post and choose the winners on Wednesday, July 22 at 6:00 pm central time. Good luck!! :)

Why Bother with Food Storeage and Preserving?

My husbands reaction to seeing so many jars of salsa (a small laugh and a confused expression) made me realize that even someone who lives with me and hears my thoughts and rants might not understand what I'm doing, so I'm betting if you surf on in to this blog and see all the food storage posts, it might not make sense to you either. Why do I bother making and canning so much when I can just go to the grocery store and buy it later if I need it? Here are a few of the reasons:

1. Locally grown produce tastes better and makes better tasting salsa, preserves, pickles, etc. It has gotten so that we won't eat produce out of season and much of it we won't even get from the grocery store because the taste is so different (inferior). If we can preserve some of it at its peak of flavor, then we can have it at its best even when the season is over.

2. I can make it for less. I can make fig preserves for the cost of the jar lid, sugar and energy to cook and waterbath can it (around twenty five cents per pint). I can make the salsa for about $1.00 per pint and that includes the cost of buying the vine-ripened, delicious tomatoes, onions, peppers, etc.

3. I can help to support the local community by buying lots of produce from local farmers. What I buy now will help my local farmers to pay their bills and feed their family in the winter when they are not selling anything. This small act might be the difference between the farmer being able to continue farming or having to sell the farm to find other work. Every dollar I spend with a farmer, instead of at the grocery store, is a full dollar that goes to the farmer, as opposed to the mere pennies on the dollar that go to the farmer through more conventional grocery store purchases.

4. We are learning and practicing skills that will help my family become more self-sufficient. We hope to own land soon so that we can take more responsibility for producing much of our own food. When that happens we will be doing a lot of food preservation and it will help that my kids and I are practiced at it since so many other things we will be doing will be new to us.

5. I know what is in it. I don't have to wonder if that ingredient I cannot pronounce is something that I want my children eating, and I don't have to keep constant watch over HFCS or Trans-Fats on ingredient lists because I know what is in it, since I made it.

6. Food security. With products being recalled on a regular basis for containing things like e coli, salmonella, listeria and lead, I feel better knowing the people who grow our food and knowing how it was grown. The tomatoes I preserve will not be recalled.

It is a lot of work, but in my opinion, it is work worth doing.

More Food Storeage Pictures

Here is the salsa (8 pints) from this weekend's farmer's market tomatoes. Also pictured are 3 pints of fig preserves we made from the fig trees on the property. This makes 5 pints plus the one's we've eaten fresh off the tree and the one's we dehydrated. The trees are still going strong, so I'm sure we'll have many more jars of figs before its all said and done.

Here are the Roma tomatoes and some figs still in the oven drying. Please ignore the oven-in-need-of-cleaning. If the kids like the figs this way, we'll make more. I'd also like to make a few more trays of "sun dried" tomatoes.

Menu Plan Monday - 7-13-09

I've decided to try an experiment with our grocery shopping. Instead of a weekly grocery run I'm trying shopping for two weeks of groceries at a time with dh stopping on his way home from work for milk as we need it and the boys and I hitting the farmer's market twice a week for fresh produce. We used to shop this way and not only was it less stress because of fewer shopping trips, but we also spent less. So yesterday was the day of the big shopping trip. It went well and we spent just slightly more than we usually spend for one week. I'm interested to see how this pans out.

This morning, I am dehydrating tomatoes and figs. We like "sun dried" tomatoes in quick bread (tomato basil bread) and on pizza, so I thought it would be fun to make our own (in the oven) with locally grown tomatoes. And I've heard that dried figs are delicious, so we're giving that a try, too. It would be nice to have another way to preserve and snack on figs. I think I'll also try fig fruit leather. As a kid, one of my friends used to always have this every summer (her grandmother made it) and we enjoyed it. Maybe my kids will, too. We'll try it out and see. They surely enjoyed the blueberry leather we made last week - it barely lasted a day. We've also been preserving some of our farmer's market finds as pickles and also salsa. Ideally, we'd like to preserve a year's worth. It will be interesting to see if we can do it.

Our menu for this week (locally grown in bold):

Breakfast (with repeats):
Eggs
French Toast (eggs)
Yogurt with plum jam
Oatmeal with butter, cinnamon and a little brown sugar or honey

Lunch (one fruit and one veggie):
Leftovers
Turkey Sandwiches
Broccoli Cheese Soup
Chicken Noodle Soup

Snacks:
Watermelon
Cantaloupe
Plums
Chips and Salsa
Hummus and Pita
Figs (my youngest and I both love them right off the tree)
Homemade bread (gonna try soaked bread) and honey butter
Yogurt with plum jam or with maple syrup
Popcorn (popped on the stove top in coconut oil with celtic sea salt and pastured butter - the smell of this cooking can always bring the kids into the kitchen, no matter what they are doing - so yummy!)
Carrots and cukes
Cookies (not sure what kind)
Quick bread (probably banana nut - again)
Strawberry/ blueberry smoothie
Cherries

Dinner (we will be dining out a few times this week)
Roasted Chicken, green salad, cantaloupe

Tuna Burgers, tomato and cuke salad, sauted squash

Chicken Noodle Soup (onions, squash), green salad

Pizza (caramelized onion, bacon and ham, or cheese and black olive), side salad

Grass-fed Beef burgers (caramelized onions, lettuce, tomato), broccoli

Leftovers



Head over to I'm an Organizing Junkie for Menu Plan Monday.

Saturday Farmer's Market and Canning Question

Tomatoes, plums, peppers, okra, cucumber, pickles, cherry jam, cookies, and cantaloupe (including cantaloupe slices, one of which we ate at the market). The banana peppers and okra were pickled on Saturday. The large tomatoes and jalapeno became salsa on Sunday (picture coming soon). The Roma tomatoes will be dehydrated on Monday along with some of the figs from the trees out back.

Ok, here is my canning question. Why is the vinegar cloudy in the banana peppers (pictured below)? Its the same vinegar that was used in the okra which did not get cloudy. The cloudiness is gone now, but I'd like to know what caused it and if its still safe to use.

Yesterday, No. Today, Yes!!

Yesterday, I checked the fig tree and there were no figs ready, although they were starting to look like they might be full sized. Today, I happened to glance at them when walking past and saw that lots were ripe! Yay!


When I went inside to change from my jeans into my shorts and get a bowl, the boys got to work and by the time I was outside again, they were done collecting the ripe ones. Instead of cooking dinner, I cooked up the figs.
Four cups of figs made one pint and a little more. I canned the one pint and the "little more" will got into the fridge to be used up this week.


I just went out to inspect the trees again and found another 2 cups or so of ripe figs. I brought them in and will probably wait until tomorrow or day after tomorrow to see if we can get to 6 cups of figs before canning again. That way, I would probably get 2 full pints to can.

We use the preserved figs on toast, with biscuits, in yogurt (dh discovered this a few weeks ago and its so yummy), in fig cobbler and we are going to try fig pinwheels and fig sweet dough hand pies. What do you do with your fig preserves?