Just looking at the calendar this month is already going to be fairly busy with all sorts of appointments and vacation time later this month. I will be taking a few hours of sick time for various appointments one of them being my MRI that was messed up last week.
Anyway, what has been happening on the farm so far? It's that time of year when it's time to start harvesting and preserving food. We are slowly getting some of what we planted just a couple two, three months ago.
Last weekend I dug up a couple of potato plants to see what we had so far. The potatoes were on the smaller side which is fine, I just wanted to see where they were as far as size. So when I went back out on Sunday and dug up some more I was surprised to see how much bigger they were. Once I got started it was hard to stop. When I had a bucket full I needed to do something with them - oooh...hash browns!
A couple of years ago I had seen a pin on Pinterest (good ol' pinterest) for freezing potatoes for hash browns. We didn't have enough potatoes from last year to do that, but this year I made sure there would be a GOOD supply! Two big rows in the big garden and a couple more in Tom's garden in front of the house.
Sunday afternoon was my hash browns day - it's hard to tell from this photo, but there are 5 quart size bags with enough potatoes for either one serving or two. It's good to have options. Also, for every couple of servings of green beans I'll be blanching/freezing a package of beans.
So my plan from now until there is nothing left to pick in the garden - process a certain amount of potatoes and beans for the freezer and then eat the rest throughout the week. If I can figure out how to process the kale we have in abundance I'll do it. Since I haven't even looked anywhere I'm not sure that I'll actually do it.
ANYWAY...
My hope was to have paste tomatoes to at least make into sauce and throw in the freezer as well. That's a big fat no go right now. The tomatoes were the last thing to go in and the spot where they are has not been that great. This year I'll have even less than last year.
Oh well, gardening is a constant learning experience right? I have mentioned to Tom that I need a second hoop house just for tomatoes. The first year we had the hoop house we had all sorts of tomatoes coming out of there. That on top of all of the cherry tomatoes in the garden.
Oh well, there is always next year.
On Labor Day which was yesterday I did a few of projects just for the fun of it. The first was a big ol' pot of chicken soup with some the sweet potatoes from a couple of my Imperfect Produce boxes. What an easy soup too, chicken, sweet potatoes, fennel bulb and onions. Season with salt and pepper. That's it! This way we won't have to think about what to do for dinner for the next night or two.
Project #2 - Fermenting Cabbage & Beets
A couple of years ago I discovered fermenting cabbage (sauerkraut). Super easy and so good! That firstyear I only had enough cabbage from the garden to do one jar. So I've been thinking about sauerkraut since then. As I said before last year's garden was terrible and I got almost nothing come harvest time.
Earlier this season I got a good size head of cabbage from Imperfect Produce so more sauerkraut happened. Last week I got another cabbage and some beets too. So I found another recipe to ferment cabbage and beets together! We'll see how that turns out, should be good though so I'm looking forward to that!
My plan is to plant beets in the fall garden and ferment some beets when those are ready to go. Also, the filderkraut that I planted in June is starting to look like it's doing something, so some of that might make it into the pantry as well. These might be a good projects for sometime in November.
Project #3 - Herbed salt
Why did I even think about that? Well, thanks to Pinterest I had another fun thing to do with the Rosemary that has been growing like crazy.
Seriously, this couldn't be easier...snipped enough sprigs of rosemary to make up about a cup and a half. Washed, dried and then whizzed them up in the food processor. Added about a half cup of kosher salt and ta-da - herby salt. Tom used it to season our smash burgers last night. SO GOOD!
Project #4 - Snack Bars
A few weeks ago a friend of mine had a virtual Pampered Chef party on Facebook. After checking out the goods I decided on a snackbar maker. All I would have to do is keep the ingredients in the pantry and ready to go. I have had that thing for several weeks and didn't do anything with it until a couple of weeks ago when I found a Larabar hack on...yep, Pinterest.
This recipe is great! No funky stuff and makes just enough mixture for a dozen bars. This is only the second batch I've made, but since they are so easy, I can see myself experimenting with other flavors. Maybe even give them away as a gift at Christmas.
As much as I love planning and getting my garden going, I think that harvest time is also pretty fun. So many options to preserve for future meals.
Our next big project will be coming up in a couple of weeks when we process the Freedom Rangers. We might be harvesting them a little early, but they are growing like crazy so it might not be so bad. As this is our first batch and we had no idea what we were doing, we are going to get to processing day with 16 birds. Out of those 16 we plan to keep one. Just because she is unique and that was the plan from the beginning. We have the equipment reserved, we have at least one other person on board...possibly two. I'm looking forward to our first batch of home grown chicken.
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| I evidently cannot count because these chickies are 8 almost 9 weeks old! |
As always...Farm Life is the Best Life!
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