My son: The Destroyer

Yesterday I went with my friend, Erica, my husband, our five kids and three of hers to pick berries. We picked for maybe an hour. My husband watched our twenty-one month old and our three year old picked berries with me, then with her boys, then with me. In case you're wondering, she ate more than she picked and I had to keep putting berries in  her basket. Between my two smallest children they ate at least an entire basket. Needless to say that they didn't eat much lunch when we got home!

I find it difficult to accomplish much when my youngest child, in particular, is awake so I generally wait until he is asleep before I start any projects. My husband made me peanut butter blossoms- my favorite cookie- but then I had to clean up. I was so lazy and ended up procrastinating until 8:00 to even clean the dinner/cookie mess. Unfortunately that meant I had to stay up very late in order to make my jam.

At about 10:00 I start boiling jars and smashing berries- yes, I took my sweet time! My mother in law had also dropped by for about a half hour so that's my excuse ;) Since I try to make the freshest most natural jam possible I have this little quirk: I MUST make my jam the day my berries are picked and I don't use pectin for any of my jams.

So I boiled the jam down to it's gelling point. This is the hardest/most time-consuming part. I think it takes about an hour to get it to right.

Then I remove my jars from the boiling water one at a time and fill them.

I clean the tops and place my lid. The lids have to be prepared before you can put them on, it's not hard, you just soften the rubber seal by soaking them in very hot water.

Meanwhile, as I fill the jars and place the lids I put them back in the pot.

Since I was making Blackberry jam I boiled them for 15 minutes and BOOM! Done! It was midnight before I finally crawled between the sheets, though.

Fast forward to this morning:

Every morning I go out into my back yard and let the chickens out of their hutch(I'm starting to suspect that one of them is a rooster) I hose off the patio because, since they are free-range, they poop on it and then I water my plants. Today My son came out and saw me appraising some of my tomatoes and began picking them. I didn't know he was so efficient! He picked four in a matter of one or two seconds! /sigh I guess I'll be waiting a while longer to have any tomatoes.

I'm really looking forward to making some tomato preserves.

I made jam, jelly, and stewed tomatoes

I'm really working on being self-sufficient. I have my garden, I have my chickens(which have yet to start laying) and now I'm finally getting fruit. I have three types of tomatoes, bell peppers, red bell peppers, pasilla peppers(some of my favorite), jalapenos, Fresno chiles, potatoes, sunflowers that I'm not convinced will mature, tons of Thai basil, some sweet basil, coriander(never again), onions, garlic... I think that's it. Can you tell I like peppers?

OK, with the jam and jelly I must confess, I cheated a little this time... I went to a fruit stand and bought my berries and my jalapenos :) This stand is run by a local family that does virtually everything by hand. I believe that the only thing they use equipment for is plowing.

The fact is: I don't have enough fruit to exclusively use my own. This is my first year with my garden, strawberries don't give enough fruit the first year for one to be truly self sufficient. I had several jalapeno plants at the beginning of the season but they were... removed(refer to previous post about the natural disaster that hit my garden.) I have already pulled one crop of potatoes. It was enough for two meals so that made me pretty happy.

My goal for this year is to get enough jam, jelly, and tomatoes that I don't have to buy any all Winter. Aside from the expense of paying $1.00 a can(if you can find it on sale) I am also concerned about all of the chemicals, be it fertilizer or pesticide, that is used to grow my food. I am also concerned about the fuel that is used in plowing, planting, harvesting, and transporting the food that I eat as well as the packaging, most of with is non-renewable. So, the logical course of action is to plant my own garden and here we are!

June happenings

So, here it is, the end of June and I haven't received any sort of harvest. The weather has been crazy and it has only recently gotten warm. I'm not sure what the exact temperatures were but it was in and around the 60s until two or three weeks ago, then it skyrocketed to the 90s and up to 105 for a couple of days. This is typical June weather; the 60s are pretty much unheard of.
My plants were seriously dwarfed by all of this cold weather! I have finally been able to start tying off my tomato plants. I have always had these crazy, out of control plants that consume my entire garden and, until this year, never knew what to do about it. Reading the SFG book I learned about suckers! what an eye opener! In all fairness I knew about suckers before but learning that they grew on tomato plants was new info. I have recently started rooting my suckers, I now have two more tomato plants!(Which is good because my chickens ate three entire plants in one morning!) I'm growing Roma, Rio grand, Heirloom, Yellow Pear and(when I replace them) Cherry tomatoes. My goal is to be able to can all of the tomatoes I'll use over the winter. I'm expecting the Roma and Rio Grand tomatoes to be the ones I can- the Cherry and Yellow Pear are just for fun- salads and such. I have several tomatoes growing on my Roma and Rio Grand vines. I can't wait to actually get some food out of these puppies!

A natural disaster hit my garden.

I'm only half kidding. It's been a while since I posted because we were having a tremendous amount of rain for a couple of weeks. We had so much rain that it literally killed my lemon tree. I planted a lemon tree around about a month ago because I love lemons. Well, the rain had other plans and so I'm left with a muddy hole in the middle of my lawn.

Now for the natural disaster- nope, it wasn't the rain. What is it about kids that makes them get into everything they aren't supposed to? I swear to you it seems like they are compelled by some unseen force toward mischief. My garden was recently decimated by little hands, most of my plants were pulled, it was devastating. I have replaced many of the things that were pulled or otherwise destroyed but I had to buy plants, it was too late to restart everything from seed. As you can tell there wasn't much to write about while I patched my garden back together.

I replaced one of my jalapeno peppers with a Fresno chile, the other space is just sitting there until I can decide what to put there. I was able to salvage most of my onions and garlic. Fortunately I hadn't planted my tomatoes out yet so they were fine. I only bought one zucchini plant. I have tons of herbs started they survived the disaster because they hadn't sprouted yet. So, long story short, our garden is back!

So I'm doing this whole "green" thing, you know. The biggest impact that a family has on the environment is their food- hence the garden. But this year I've decided to take things a step further and I bought some chicks. Don't laugh! I bought chickens because there are seven of us, we eat a lot of eggs. Shoot, we eat a lot of everything but I figure the less that I rely on the stores the better.

Compost

Don't you just love compost! I mean, come on, it's so exciting! Right? Not so much. Yes, compost is awesome, it is great, it does great things for your soil and your plants but it isn't something people get all excited over.

If you're anything like me you're like "eh, too much work" when someone suggests composting. About this time last year I started my first compost bin. It was a trashcan outside and I just tossed everything into it. It was a horrible stinking sludgy mess! I dumped it out on the side of my house that we don't use(into a hole that my kids dug) and it sat(and grew potatoes.) I'd say about 3 months ago I decided to give it another shot and this time, I decided, would be different.

This time I'm adding stuff to my compost every single day, I'm turning it every single day. I must confess that the idea of shredding up newspaper(it's non toxic and compostable) doesn't thrill me so I just rip it up. I figure I'm not wasting energy running that noisy shredder; so what if it takes a teeny bit longer to break down? I'm not going to waste time shredding it. Period.

The most important things that I've learned while composting: dry out your grass before you add it to your compost and turn it often. It should go without saying but I'll just get it out there: No waste from meat-eating animals! No, your cat's poop will not help out that compost heap! Or your Dogs! And for goodness' sake not yours either! The reason for these exclusions are simple: disease. You can have bird poop(including chicken), cow poop, worm poop, but not your poop.
Moving on.

Remember how I said that compost is great? Well, it is, let me tell you why. When you compost material it shrinks down to one-tenth the size that it was. Let's let that sink in for just a moment. This isn't something that I've given much thought to until this week(hence, the post) I have probably 200 lb of compost from the last 3 months. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out what 10 times 200 equals... My family has saved over a ton of garbage from going into our landfill just in the past few months. How is that possible? There are seven of us and you can compost anything that came from plant matter. You already know that I garden, whatever I pull out of the garden goes where? Into the compost heap! Egg shells. Into the compost heap! Bread crusts. Into the compost heap! Tortillas. Into the compost heap! Pancakes, too.

Pull Me!

I swear to you plants must say to kids: pull me! They must scream it! I've recently experienced a rash of children pulling my plants! First it was my jalapeno plants, then my basil plants, today it was onions and garlic(which I plunked right back into the dirt. I had to chase my niece and my daughter out of a planter today. I'm not really sure what it is about plants but kids HAVE to mess with them. /sigh.

My daughter, she's 3, decided to pick some peas this afternoon while I was preparing Dinner. I can tell you this: she is learning. Every time she has picked peas before she had a ton of little peas that weren't even an inch long. Today she picked nice big ones. That's my girl!

Rain

Well, it's raining! Free water!
One good thing about doing square foot gardening (SFG) is that one uses far less water than with typical gardening. I think I use 4 gallons a day for 48 square ft of garden. That isn't 48 feet including aisles; I have 48 ft of just plants! Some days I don't even have to water because of the nature of the mix that I use, it holds water like crazy but still drains. I definitely recommend the book.

I turned my compost, which was a bit heavy due to the rain, but it's coming along nicely. I've got tons of potatoes growing- I'm actually giving out some seed potatoes to friends today! I have five yukon gold and five red potatoes, so far. The great thing about potatoes is the way that they grow. If you plant a potato six inches deep you'll have six inches of potatoes but if you keep adding dirt onto the plant once it's above ground it will keep growing and you'll get much more out of each plant. So far I have two red potatoes peeking out of the dirt, I'll be adding more soil to them when they are about six inches high.

My garlic and onions are growing like crazy! I have one square foot of garlic(sixteen plants) so far but its so easy to plant that I'll have tons by the end of Summer. I have eight sq ft of onions, two of green onions. Onions are grown sixteen to a sq ft. Do you think I like onions? In two weeks I'm adding another sixteen sq ft! I can't wait! Guess What. It's going to have another three sq ft of onions! Yes, I know that is a lot of onions but the great thing about them is that they keep for months all you have to do is cure them. (No, I've never cured them but it doesn't sound hard. I'll let you know when I actually do it.) Another thing that I like about onions is that you can just yank them out of the ground whenever you'd like and make dinner. It's fantastic! Oops! Out of onions? Right to the yard and Bam! Dinner!