In the Kitchen

49°f/9.4°C, mostly clear. Full moon last night, foggy during the night and heavy dew this morning.

It's been a busy day in the kitchen, and it only 2:00 pm as I sit down to rest.

It started early, with breakfast. I made one of our favorites: English muffins with mashed avocado, a slice of ham, and slice of tomato, topped off with a fried egg. I fry my eggs in very little oil, turning the heat low and putting the lid on the skillet so that the tops cook at the same time as the bottoms. We sometimes top this stack up with sour cream. 

Next was stove-cleaning. Canning makes a mess of my stove no matter how carefully I am. The burner tray on my old Tappan get especially bad with cooked on whatever. They are stainless steel, fortunately, so I can scrub away! It was good to get it clean; even though i clean it between canning sessions, I don't always get to those burner trays. But now I am canning more green beans, so more scrubbing is in my future. Never-ending,  folks, just never-ending.

Before getting into the beans, I put together a batch of spaghetti sauce, to use up an accumulation of tomatoes--too many to eat, not enough to can, so spaghetti it is. That meant chopping up lots of stuff--peppers, onions, garlic,  celery, and a jar of canned COW mushrooms. I sautéed all that, and browned the ground venison while the tomatoes cooked.  Then I used the immersion blender to puree the tomatoes,skins and all, and added my herbs and spices. Now everything is together and simmering away. I used up the rest of the celery, cutting it into sticks for Larry's snacks, and put the basil I had dried last month into a jar for storage.  

Next was green beans. I got the canner ready for another 8 pints, then put a pot on to cook, to go with the spaghetti.  I added chicken bouillon and garlic, and let that cook on low while I washed dishes and cleaned up the counters, then came in here to my chair to put my feet up a few minutes and write.

Now the canner is calling me back to the kitchen. And the dried kaundry needs to brought in and the next load hung out. And so it goes in this little house in the hills.

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

In the Gardens Again

58°f this morning, partly cloudy. 

We were back in the garden this morning after leaving it to fend for itself a few days. And fend it did! 

This is my late garden, or part of it anyway--2 kinds of lettuce in the row on the right (one kind, Parrish Island, is like Romaine but did mot germinate very well), then dwarf kale with something I think was supposed to be Easter Egg radishes but seems to be a mix of turnips, radishes, and parsnips! The next row is the bok choi and turnips. The wee leeks are invisible in the last row to the left that sports a random bok choi---I guess I dropped a seed.

The squash seem to have no intention of stopping production.

There was another worker in the garden today too.

Bok choi. I need recipes! 

Almost a half bushel of beans, half of a 10-quart bucket of cucumbers that i gave to my friend Tamara, a dozen or more squash and zucchini (also given to Tamara(, a couple quarts of cherry tomatoes, half a dozen big maters, and lettuce, bok choi, and turnips.

So my afternoon was spent getting all this cleaned up  and put away and getting the beans snapped and canned. Bok choi is new to me; I have never grown or eaten it before but it is thriving in my garden so I am on the lookout for recipes. Today I made one that combined the bok choi and mushrooms. I used chives in place of green onions and added some very thinly sliced turnips to the stir-fry.  It was delicious, and definitely on my make-again list.

The lettuce and radishes I planted Thursday are already up, thanks to the recent rain. No rain is in the forecast for this whole week, though, so I will be watching these little baby plants to see if they will need watering. Can you see the little things?

That's the radishes above, below is lettuce. So, so tiny.

While the beans were in the canner, I changed up my glass on the buffet to reflect the changing season. Amber, I think, is the perfect autumn color. This glass is all well over 100 years old, and one piece is 150 or so. 

Back in the Gardens Again

61°f/16°C this morning, rain, continued all day, some localized flooding. Over 2" total, and cold! Temperature dropped to 55°by evening.

It was a foggy ol' morning out there today, and honestly it was a bit of a relief to know it would rain all day and I can take it easy. I pretty much overdid it the last two days, working for hours outside, and I paid for it last evening, getting myself dehyrated and a little feverish and hurting all over. You would think I would know better. So today has been a day of rest and it felt pretty good.

I appreciated all your comments on yesterday's post about the good people I met recently. I agree, we all need to be more aware of the goodness around us in these dark days. It helps me that we do not watch TV, so our news exposure is pretty limited, otherwise I think I would find it overwhelming. But there are so many people out there doing good things in quiet ways, and it helps to remember that. And noticed it.

I have at last planted ALL the plants that were waiting on me. It seems like every time I would be nearly done, lo and behold more plants magically appeared. Okay, not magically, I bought them. But I haven't bought any more since Tuesday, so maybe I am finally done? Probably not.

The Mexican primroses are really taking over in this bed. I pull them up as I need space, them and the lamb's ear which also spreads at will.  That's a random peach tree on the right, no idea how a seed got there but I have let it grow. There used to be a peach tree here about 20 years ago when this was the compost bin and not a garden. So perhaps a seed survived all those years?

These pictures did not load as I had intended so it's a mishmash of veggie and flower gardens. This is the lettuce and spinach. For the first time ever in my life, I have spinach. I have never had luck with it. I think I have found the solution, at last: blood meal. Greens need lots of nitrogen, and apparently I wasn't giving the spinach enough.

Hard to see, but these are the peas on the arbor, doing terribly because this area is too wet for them. I'll pull them up this week, I think, and get the rattlesnake beans planted. The rhubarb is under the arbor and is doing well so far. On the left are the tomatoes, also doing well. I've had to add my bone meal/blood meal/wood ash mix a couple times because of all the rain leaching out the nutrients. These were planted in the no-till area, so we just pulled back the mulch and dug holes for them. It took longer for them to look good, but now they seem to be fine.

Oh, and the big black and white thing is one of those air thingies that car lots use. Granddaughter Sarah sent it because she had heard it would keep predators away from the chickens. Larry figured it would keep crows out of the garden too, and it certainly seems to be working. It's a skeleton, kinda weird but effective.

The herb garden is finally finished, for now.

I used a log from the tree that fell on my van to be a plant stand. You can see part of the tree is still waiting for Larry to finish cutting it up. Maybe one day...

I love this rose, and have had a time keeping it safe from the deer. I thought they had killed it last summer, but here it still is. The bloom turns pink as it ages. I thought it was a climber so planted it by the big wagon wheel, but oops. 

The first canna to bloom looks a little worse for wear for some reason.

The old cast iron pot was painted and had a hole in it, but sure makes a pretty planter.

Back in the veggie garden, this is the cabbage and broccoli, and at the top of the photo is the tiny corn. The broccoli is beginning to head up.

This is hard to see, but it is an area below where I planted a strip of wildflowers three springs ago. Mixed in the grass and weeds are many coreopsis plants, along with a few cosmos, that seeded themselves.

And this is the original row. I planted a row of daffodils here and on a whim scattered the wildflower seeds on top of them. Now, after the daffodils are done, I have all these coreopsis and yarrow. Last year I tilled the area behind them and planted more flower seeds, but due to the drought only a few came up. But this year, we have quite a row of zinnias and other flowers back there, Problem is, there is grass and weeds too. So what to do? try to weed it? leave it to its own devices? Any advice appreciated.

That's about all the news, because that's about all I've been doing. Except today I did run to the store to get some meds and a bandage for Little Boy, who has been limping for a while. 

We left him alone thinking that, as dogs do, he would take care of it himself, but it seemed to be getting worse. It looks like he has got it caught in something and kind of split the area between his paw pads, so it looks pretty sore. He does not like the bandage, but I put lavender oil on it so he won't chew it off and so far that seems to be working.

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