Of Cabbages, Potatoes, Garlic and Peaches

71°f, or 21.7°C, at 8am, muggy and overcast. Predicted rain did not materialize, again. It is so dry.

A few things in bloom right now:

We are watering again, after a one-day break. Will it ever rain again in enough quantity, and regularly? It has been boom or bust this year.

But the gardens are still trying and are doing okay so far. Our soil type is Upshur Muskingum silty clay loam, and is a very deep soil, a long way down to bedrock. Being on a ridge means water drains off quickly, and our soil has a lot of sand in it (the native stone being sandstone), so it also doesn't retain moisture. We have added a lot of organic matter over the years to my garden in particular, and the mulch is helping, but even so it needs watering considering we have not had ample rain since mid-May. 

Yesterday Larry dug out the rest of the garlic, and there was a LOT of it! This is just some of the harvest.

This guy was an overachiever! He actually came up outside of my flowerbed, so I just trimmed around him.

Larry also removed the cabbage "stumps", so I was able to plant kale and onions yesterday evening. I made a couple quarts of kraut,  

put 2 cabbages in the extra fridge to use this month, and froze 5 bags for later use. While hoeing the row before planting, I accidentally dug up a volunteer potato plant. It had quite a few potatoes on it, so I dug up a couple more volunteers and got this nice mess.

Yesterday evening our younger friends Jeff and Tamara came over. I had messaged her to come get some garlic, and she brought me a 5-gallon bucket of peaches. Nice trade! I sent her home with a bag of 100 onion sets too, as I had more of those than I will need. 

So today you know what I am doing: putting up peaches,  of course. I had some bananas that needed to be used too, and we arevtired of banana bread, so I blended them up with so.e honey, lemon juice and peaches, and poured the resulting puree into ice cube trays to freeze. We can eat them like Popsicles, or thaw and add to yogurt. Sure was a delicious mixture.

Well, must get back to the kitchen. My feet needed a rest and I needed coffee, but the peaches are calling. 

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Best Friends

66°f this morning, 18.9°C. Going to get hot again, high of 88 with clear skies. Where is the rain? 

Buddy and Little Boy, aka Dumb and Dumber, aka Thing 1 and Thing 2.  We adore them both. And Daisy, our old yellow Lab, is enjoying not being pestered by Buddy all day long and can enjoy her retirement.

Little Boy's only been here 2 weeks, but fitting in well. He has chewed up many boxes, plant cellpacks,  and anything else left within his reach that looks interesting.  But a good boy.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

First Tomatoes, and Wildlife Woes

69°f this morning, rising to 82 by this evening. Clouds, then clear.

Last night's rain has sunk right in, and the soil is already dry again. I spent the morning working in my large flowerbed, then cut the 8 Stonehead cabbages as they were ready, pulled the early onions, and pulled the garlic the always comes up in the large flowerbed. The deer have been in my flowerbed again and destroyed a planter of petunias,  so now we have chicken wire around the entire bed. Now let's see if that keeps them out.

In other wildlife news, we have a chicken thief. We lost 5 chickens when we were gone Saturday to help our friend clear her basement. Then yesterday evening there was a great commotion in the henhouse and by the time Larry got down there, another hen was gone. I am pretty sure it is a fox, just by the sneaky behavior, the evening raid, and because it leaves no trace. Most other chicken thieves leave a trail or sign of some kind. We believe we have a fox denning in the deep hollow below the curve in the driveway, and chances are she has pups now and needs to feed them. But our remaining hens will stay locked safely in the coop for now, until we can figure out a way to prevent these raids. It's just infuriating. 

But there is good news too! We picked our first 2 ripe tomatoes last week, on June 20th (West Virginia's birthday, btw), 

and our first cucumber today. Dinner last night was pork chops, cabbage, squash, and tomatoes--good ol' summertime fare. What pleasure.

Country life has plenty of upside and downs, just, I am sure, as urban life. Wildlife is both a good thing and a bad thing for us,  a beautiful pleasure and an aggravating hassle. The other evening we watched this young fella trying to make his way out of the graveyard that's about half a mile from our house. Maybe those dead people spooked him?

Looks like he's standing on top of the fence, doesn't it?

Aha! A hole!

And free at last. He's a nice four-point, most likely one of the twin yearlings that hung around the same area last year.

Isn't he gorgeous? When he is far away from my gardens, yes he is! But it's the price we pay for living where we do and trying to garden. We just have to take the bad with the good. Even if the bad eats the petunias.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Ahhhhh

Finally.

Rain danced all around us today. We watched as storm after storm passed north, south, east or west of us. So frustrating! 

By finally,  around 8pm, we got a howling good storm. No lightning, a little wind,  and LOTS of rain. What a relief. We were already planning tomorrow's watering routine. Now, maybe we can give it a rest for a couple days. Thankfully,  temperatures have moderated a bit, too.

We planted green beans and late corn this morning,  hoping for rain. The ground was sobdrybitcwas like planting in dust. But this should settle the seeds in well.

Right now we are on the porch, quietly celebrating.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Hot

72°f this morning, and rose quickly to 98°f. 

Black Cohosh, which blooms in quite a few places along Joe's Run. Looks cool, but it was 95° when I took this.

Friends, it is just too hot for my blood. I guess I inherited my English mother's genes in the heat department,  rather than my New Orleans-born daddy's. I am so done with summer...and it has just begun.

Yesterday's temperature. 

At least we were comfortable the past two days, helping a friend clean out her basement as she prepares to move to an independent living facility. We will miss her very much, but she has made what she feels is the best decision at this point in her life. Her sweet husband died 2 years ago, and at 80 she cannot maintain her home, and has health issues as well. So, we sorted and sorted and sorted, years of memorabilia, a lot of it from her husband's family. A lot went to the trash, a lot is waiting for his adult children to sift through, some is earmarked for an auction, and then there is some she still needs to think about.

I came home feeling sorrowful, after watching her wade through a lifetime of memories, but also grateful that I continually sort and clear out my closets and drawers. No basement and no attic thankfully prevents me from squirreling away too much stuff.

I came home with a lot too, truck and van both pretty full, but with the exception of one or two pieces, this will all be put in my booths. My friend was an antiques dealer, and wanted me to get this stuff to sell. How sweet is that! Some of it had once been in her shop and still had her tags attached. 

So I have more work ahead of me to unload, clean, research and price. At least it will be mostly inside work!

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

73

67°f this morning, sunny.

I had a warm cinnamon roll, brownies, pizza, wine, strawberry pie, and fresh tomatoes. I helped a friend clean out her basement, saw or  heard from friends and family, laughed a lot, had calls from all 4 living sons. 

It has been a great birthday. 

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Sweat Equity

75°f this morning, 24°C, humid, slight overcast.  

Do you ever have a day when you never quite get to the things you planned to do when you got up? That was today for me.

It started out as planned, at least. We were up early to get the watering done. But while in the garden I noticed that the broccoli needed to be cut, and there was squash to be picked and if we didn't pull the peas soon they would be no good. 

So painting projects and ebay got shoved aside. I thought I would still get to them, but we wanted to finish up that Hoosier cabinet we have been cleaning, so after shelling the peas and getting them and the broccoli blanched and vacuum-sealed for the freezer, I began scrubbing.  And scrubbing.  And scrubbing. By then it was 4:30 and time to start dinner.

In all, it was a good day really, just not what I expected. It always feels good to get our produce stored away. Tonight's dinner was a good example of the results of all the sweat and work:

steamed broccoli and buttery squash straight from the garden, stuffed peppers from last year's garden that I had in the freezer, trout given to us by our friend Jeff, which was also stashed in the freezer and seasoned with homemade ramp salt, and homemade tartar sauce.

For this meal the only things we bought at the store were the oil and flour to fry the fish, the aluminum foil that wrapped the stuffed peppers, butter, rice, mayonnaise to make the tartar sauce,  and salt and pepper.  To drink we had orange-pineapple juice I canned last year, mixed with ginger ale. All those drink ingredients, of course, came from the store.

Now I suppose some might say, yeah but it costs money to grow a garden, and is it worth it? Honestly, peas are not cost-effective. I ended up with about 4-5 pints, I suppose. Figure up the cost of the seed, and then time and effort to plant, cultivate, stake, and shell, well...but the taste! So it's a trade-off, I guess. For almost everything else, gardening is a money-saver--that is, once you have been at it a while and have all the equipment! For a beginner, the cost of a tiller, tools, fencing, watering supplies, and preservation supplies might be daunting. Most of these things last for years, though, so the cost has to be reckoned over a long time.

The biggest factor in a decision to have a garden, though, is will it be enjoyable? Because if a person doesn't like the work involved, it will seem like a burden. I remember as a child how I complained and whined about weeding, stringing beans, etc! I would much rather have been on my bike or roller-skating. Larry was the same growing up. He hated his Dad's gardens. 

And yet here we are, spending most of our summer doing those things we used to hate. These days, though, being out there is the most relaxing part of my day, and I always come back to the house in a happy mood. Even if I find, like this morning, that the #$%!&# deer have visited in the night and eaten the celosia I had carefully raised from seed. Even that can't cancel the pleasure of being in the garden early in the morning, surrounded by the songs of birds, the busyness of the bees, and the scent of the tomato plants as I brush against them.

By the way, there is a backstop to the drinking glass in the picture. I posted a picture of this glass on Facebook, and a friend wrote to tell me that her family had a personal connection to those glasses. All I knew about them was that I remembered Old Virginia jams and jellies coming in them in the 1950s-60s. Jane told me that her family had owned a farm near Front Royal, Virginia, and they grew apples and other stone fruits as well as a wide variety of berries. Some of their produce was sold to Old Virginia, which made the jam and jellies right there in Front Royal. Just in the past few months the farm finally passed out of her family, but she still has a dozen of these glasses.

Front Royal was a town I often visited, and wanted to move there when my first husband and I decided to move away from Manassas, which had grown too much too fast. But he eventually got his job transferred to Charleston,  WV, and that is how I ended up here along the Ohio River. After our divorce, he did move to the Front Royal area, but here I still am on the land we bought in 1975.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Back to the Booths

72°f this morning, and a high of 95°. Muggy, not a pleasant day at all.

I revamped the window at our booth a bit but only got a photo looking from the inside out.

A good shower overnight meant we did not have to water this morning, thankfully, but we will be out in an hour or two to turn on the sprinkler and carry buckets. It will be the routine until this heat breaks.

We started the day with a visit from our son Derek, to help Larry load that green cabinet in the van. Usually we can manage even very heavy pieces, but this time I had to cry uncle, as my back is giving me issues. But I bribed Derek with breakfast: blueberry apple pecan pancakes, with a mixed berry homemade sauce. We had a nice visit, dawdling over coffee on the porch.

Then it was off to take the cabinet to our booth. Unloading was no issue--it was those 5 steps at home that were a problem. Now it is in place and for sale.

We took in a few other things to add to our booths too, and did a little freshening up while we were there.

I have several pieces of Blenko Glass for sale here, some from my collection  Blenko has been made since the 1930s and is famous for their Midcentury art glass. This salad set was made by them.

One I just brought in from my collection.

And a recent find.

Blenko on the right, L.E. Smith center, Fenton on the left. All made in this area.

Blenko, Viking, Fenton.

Another Blenko piece.

This old camera is in working order, just needs film.

All kinds of tiny things make their way into this case.

Cool smoking pipes.  The one on the left is from Ukraine.

 Mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

I had 4 of these; this is the last of the lot.

 

Just odds and ends.

Coalminer's turtleshell hard hat is actually all leather. From the 1920s.

Fenton vase.

Last photo: old ironstone pitcher that I really would like to keep, but therevis this thing called lack of space!

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

What To Do When It's Too Hot?

75°f at 8am, 24.9°C. Light breeze, a few clouds. Now at 4pm it is 95°f, 35°C. 

It is too hot. Too hot to be outside even for a few minutes,  definitely too hot to do anything out there. We got into the garden early, watering, tyibg up tomatoes, hoeing, and I stuck in a few more peppers and picked some zucchini,  lettuce, beets, carrots and onions. By then it was 10am and I was sweating from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, literally. Dripping sweat from my face like a river. Yuck.

But it was nice to be out there with Larry, as we both puttered around taking care of little things. And nice to get back to the porch under the fan! After a late breakfast, we have been working on inside things--cleaning, laundry,  etc. Then got to work on projects, which was pretty much the same routine as yesterday, when it was also over 90. If we can't be outside, there is always a piece of furniture, or two or three, that we can work on.

Like this washstand. Made in the 1800s, it had been painted dark brown over older gray paint. I bought it through an online auction and thought it was a wood finish, but of course it wasn't.  I considered painting it, but when I started sanding and saw the beautiful wood, I knew we had to restore it. Many hours of sanding, two coats of stain, and three applications of dark wax brought it back to life. It's not perfect, but it sure looks better than when we bought it.

I like the unique catch on one door, where a handhewn piece of wood slides up into a groove to hold the door closed,

the keyhole 

and the little porcelain casters. Will it sell? It will probably take a while, honestly, because natural finish wood does not move quickly here. But I am happy to have it back close to its original beauty, and eventually someone else will appreciate it too. I hope.

I also finished up the desk we pulled from someone's curbside trash during the town's cleanup week. Pretty happy with this one too, just need to find a chair to go with it.

We bought this chair at a yard sale for a couple dollars, already painted a pretty dark green. I had thought to paint it to go with the desk, but why paint something that already looks great? All it needed was for the seat to be glued and clamped, and cleaned up a bit. So it will go to the booth as a single. We sell quite a few single chairs, actually.

A few small projects, some finished, some still in progress.

This plant or candle stand needed only a fresh coat of paint.

A very old child's chair needed a lot of repair and is still a fragile piece, good only for decorative use. We couldn't bear to toss it out though, so Larry did what he could and perhaps it will fund a home.

I painted this small table/plant stand a color called Morning Sunrise, a cross between blue and lavender. The name always cracks me up, because when else does the sun rise if not morning?

Still have to attach the fabric to the seat here, put another coat of paint on, distress, and dark wax this stool. I think I will tip the legs in antique gold, just for fun.The seat lifts off for a small storage area.

Old birdcage just needed paint. One coat on, at least one more to go.

And last, another child's chair, this one a rocker. I am not in love with the color I chose, but I think after dark wax I will like it better. I was thinking this color for fall and even Christmas decor, but I don't know. Maybe white would be a safer bet? 

Not pictured is a Hoosier cabinet we have been cleaning up. It is pretty much done, thank goodness, because we were working on it on the deck when it was cooler! Only need to clean some paint off the porcelain table top to complete that job.

It feels good to get projects finished up, because we have many others waiting on us to have time to do them. 

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.