So much has changed on Blogger that I am going to have to study it. I can find anything I want on the internet but I am as dumb as a box of rocks on computer things! One can't know everything.

We are going to be setting up our Facebook account for the Market Garden soon. A friend is going to help us who does websites. I have always stayed as far away from that as I can but with a business it almost a crime not to have a page. I will only be posting once or twice a week for any updates for our CSA or specials we will be having at the Farmer's Market. There is still so much to get ready and our infrastructure isn't there yet. I am taking care of all the nursery stock which has overtaken the basement and our guest bedroom as well as most other windows in the house. I still have about 50 tomato plants to transplant tonight. We will be selling those in the next couple of weeks to get them out. Our hoop house still isn't put up. Duane has been working on the greenhouse. I will post a pic of that tomorrow when there is light.

I need to update everything on here tonight so tomorrow it should look different. We have 2 different dogs now who are both middle aged. I guess I do need to do an update. Manana!

We have moved! And moved! And moved!

We have finally moved back to Indiana since I last wrote on this blog. It has been years! We have lived all over the country since then-Kentucky, Indianapolis, different places in Indiana, and New Mexico. Although I left my home in NM,

if I were to choose anywhere else to live, it would be Indiana--for those I left behind.

Has It Been That Long?!

Oh My!!! More than a year since I have written anything, but then I know why. My husband lost his job here in Indiana, found one in Tennessee so we moved just across the state line in Kentucky only to have him lose his job six weeks later! thankfully he did find handyman work for awhile but it got less and less and so now we are back in Indiana with him doing handyman work here. We lost our Muffalo (Brandy) in August and I still haven't gotten over that despite having picked up a pup at a shelter. (Boaz/Bo) We are thankful to be back especially because of the church that we missed so much. People who truly want to know and obey the Word of God and who care for one another.

So let's see if I can keep writing.

OOOOOPS!

Forgot to tell you all:

This recipe was taken from The Doubleday Cookbook by Jean Anderson, published 1972 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.-------------one of the best cookbooks I have ever used.

The House Smells Soooo Good!

This is where I start my canning. I purchase the very best products. These really do make a difference in how your end product tastes. That is the reason I can. Because I like my food better than anything I can buy.

I'm going to demonstrate here Pickled red cabbage. It actually is more a sweet and sour red cabbage. Right now you can buy red cabbage for practically a song, especially at the local farmers markets. Or try www.localharvest.org and look for a farm in your area.

Last night I thinly sliced 5 quarts of red cabbage and put all in a large stainless steel bowl with 2 1/2 quarts of water and 1/2 cup of kosher salt (pickling salt-NEVER iodized salt). I let that soak overnight.

Today I washed 8 pint jars and put them in the oven at 250 degrees to sterilize them until I needed them..

The lids I put into boiling water and then turned it off.
I then proceeded to make my syrup of 2 1/2 quarts of vinegar, 2 1/2 cups of organic cane sugar, and 5 tablespoon of pickling spices (4 broken cinnamon sticks, 2 Tbl. mustard seed, 4 tsp. peppercorns, 2 tsp cloves, 2 tsp whole allspice, 2 tsp dill seed, 4 bay leaves) that I put in a small muslin bag. (You can also wrap it all in cheesecloth or tulle or whate
ver)in a stainless steel container. NEVER use aluminum.


I brought that to a boil for 10 minutes. While that was boiling I filled my jars.

Never pack too tightly nor too lightly. Too tight and air gets trapped. Too lightly and you use too much syrup and there is 2 inches of juice on the bottom.
Next I turned off the syrup and quickly filled the jars with syrup within
1/4 inch of the top.

Working quickly to prevent the jars from cooling off I wiped the rims, put on the hot lids, and sealed with the rings tightly.

Now I will cool them overnight and check in the morning to see if all the lids have compressed in the middle. If they haven't I would pour it into a pan and bring it to a boil, resterilize my jar and a NEW lid and put it all back into the jar again, cap it, and see if it works that time. Tomorrow I will label them and put them in a dark, cool, dry place for 4-6 weeks. That will give them the time they need to pickle. Yummy!

Woah Nellie!

I have been so busy! Canning has taken over my life! Every year I am getting better at stocking up the harvest. I hate to let anything go to waste. But then in a sustainable garden nothing ever goes to waste. It goes to compost! I'm desperate to get everything from the garden in before the apples and pears have to be put up. Because WOW! there's a ton of them.

I don't need anymore jams but I will probably make apple butter and pear butter just to do it. I want to dry alot of apple slices and make spiced cinnamon apple rings and spiced pears. I also came across a recipe for spiced crabapples.
I usually take Brandy for her walk about a mile and a half from here. There are monstrous athletic fields with trails through the bordering woods. It is there that I found all my black raspberries (quarts and quarts) and wild grapes. And the wild crabapple. Also I discovered hackberries and one other fruit tree I am working on identifying. I read a quote today that said, "90% of yellow and white berries are poisonous, 90% of blue or black are not, and with red it is 50-50. This is a tree with black fruit like small cherries clustered tightly together. It could be choke cherry I suppose, but then I have to wonder what I was seeing just a few weeks ago in the same area. Those could have been a wild cherry(quite bitter) and these could be choke cherries.
Guess what? It's a choke cherry! I just found it online. I'll have to go back and find a small twig with leaves from the "other" tree and compare that with pictures online.
There is one other tree I am interested in. It reminds me of the Russian olive trees from New Mexico. It is even putting out what look like olives. I understand that they are edible, kind of sweet, but mealy. We'll see. It is an invasive plant but I do love the sweet fragrance of its spring blooms.I'll take pictures tomorrow and see if anyone knows what they are.
All this to say that I am driving myself crazy trying to keep up with getting everything done. I need children!

A day of rest (almost)

I love Sundays. Most of them are beautiful. Today was no exception. Duane has been pretty sick with the flu this week so we took the time to stay home and rest. We listened to John MacArthur teaching on the Second Coming of Christ over at http://www.oneplace.com/ and he helped me get the garden watered well.

I am thrilled to see the muskmelon are finally producing. They have overrun their space and are going to overtake Brandies dog yard any minute now! When you have any squash family plants or viney types you can tell the female flowers from the male by the swelling just behind the blossom. It looks like she's pregnant! If it is pollinated it will become fruit, but if not, it will wither and fall off. You can assure pollination by doing it for yourself. Just take a small artist's brush and take some of the pollen from the stamens of the male flowers (those are the little stalks sticking out of the middle of the flower) and then depositing the pollen you have collected onto the stamens of a female flower. But we have so many bees around here (it really is amazing) and wasps that we can see them buzzing around continually during the day by the hundreds just above the plants.

The above photo is the muskmelon patch. We put up "ladders" and attached chicken fence on both sides so the melons would have a way to climb. We were hoping to save some space that way. The picture is actually a little over a week old and the plants are up and over the top of the ladders and in -between them and through the fence surrounding the whole thing! It is an 8x8 patch of mostly sand. I think we have 4 plants on each side but I can't remember and there's no telling now. I wanted to use knee highs to tie up the fruit for support but we have lost the battle with the overflow that has entangled itself in the fence. Awww, too bad--NOT! This muskmelon is called Swan Lake. The picture looked so refreshing and beautiful I had to try it. We bought the seed from Seeds of Change out of New Mexico. http://www.seedsofchange.com/

The little plant in front of the chain link fence is actually 4 gherkins in a 3 gallon pot. They are growing nicely along the fence now. They went in late but I have already had one and there is now an abundance of flowers. The leaves are showing a sign that the plant is in need of magnesium. The veins on some leaves are very green and stand out while the rest of the leaf has a yellow tone to them. I put on a good organic fertilizer today and hope that will do the trick. I wish my compost was finished so I could use that but it will be a couple of weeks yet. Then I will screen it and put into the new pile the larger unfinished stuff.

OK. I tried to put the top picture just above this paragraph but it didn't work. I've got a lot to learn. Sigh That picture was taken from the roof of half of the backyard. Actually, at the back of the yard are 3 apple trees and a pear tree that you can't see. They are loaded this year. God has given us an abundance! There is a banana tree to the west of the patio. It now has 8 leaves. It is a dwarf canvendish. I am hoping it will flower and produce for us. It has three babies at the bottom we need to remove and transplant. And you can see the blue barrel at the edge of the house. We actually have a water catchment system. Duane is able to get these food grade barrels from work. Then he has put good size brass spigots on them and connected six of them around the back of the house at different points. That way we don't have to keep unhooking the hose when one is empty. They drain into the last one on the chain. Or we can use them individually if we don't want to drag the hose around one side of the house to the other. He set one barrel on top of another at the front of the house also. They look like a nice splash of color against the light blue of the house.

You can even see my clothesline that runs diagonally in the back right corner of the dog yard. It is a godsend in these times when gas is so expensive. I love a good clothesline!