Category Archives: the homestead

Harvesting and our First Freeze

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This weekend we had our first freeze. It wasn’t hard enough to kill off the hardy perennials or the cool weather veggies, but my tender crops had to be harvested. My daughter picked two boxes of tomatoes, I got about 5 quarts of stewed tomatoes and a full box of nice, big beautiful green tomatoes….I am still contemplating their use.

We also dug up the potatoes. I have been really excited about these. This is the first year we have grown potatoes. Dadzoo made a 4×8 foot planter box that was 14 inches deep. We planted mostly good ol‘ russets and a few fancy varieties that my Dad gave to me , (he is know for his fancy varieties)…….I don’t know the names, but they were small finger potatoes, the white ones having a pretty pink hue and, to my children’s delight, purple potatoes!


We got about two full boxes of potatoes. I was hoping for more, next year we will plan a little bit earlier and Dadzoo is going to make the bed deeper.

I also harvested my onions. We got about 30 nice big onions and several smaller ones. We will be doing these again next year.

My winter squash and pumpkins were a big disappointment. This is all we got for the 10 plants we planted. I had major problems with squash bugs and they just didn’t do well. We will try again next year!


The pretty greeny/gray pumpkins are called Queensland blue, aren’t they pretty and different! Then we have a white pumpkin called….well I can’t remember…..but it is suppose to be white, kind of fun and different. Then we have a good old butter nut squash!

I didn’t have any summer squash to harvest, they finally succumbed to the dreaded squash bug early in September…well really I finally gave up battling that stupid bug!…grrrr…..

Dadzoo parent also gave us two boxes of these beautiful red apples off their tree. I am going to store them in the basement for eating, I am so done with canning apples this year! They are really sweet and crisp, they will be good for eating in the next few months.

It was a good thing we got the tender veggies in, this is what we woke up to Sunday morning (we didn’t get as much snow as some people did, which is pretty typical in our little micro climate) but it made for a frosty cold morning. That night we had our freeze, it was in the high 20’s. The ground is still warm so the cold nipped a lot of things, but left enough of the hardier plants to make for a beautiful Indian Summer.


Despite the snow my roses are still blooming their little hearts out now that it has warmed up a bit. Last year I had blooms in my garden on Thanksgiving Day.



Keepin’ it real

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Ok.
So.
I have a confession…

I haven’t been totally honest with y’all

See I post these beautiful pictures of my yard

and well
I only post the pretty parts of my yard.

I completely,

completely
ignore the ugly parts
(and as you will see, there are some ugly parts)
and the ugly parts that creep into my pretty parts
well…

I (gasp) photoshop them out!

yes,
the crop tool is my favorite.

So, in the spirit of honesty

and keepin’ it real
here you go
the ugly pictures
uncensored
uncut
uncropped…


oh, wait, this isn’t one of the ugly parts
he was the only thing pretty about my yard that day…
(gotta love that hair)



no those bushes aren’t turning color because it is almost autumn time
they are dieing.
(see the big thistles under the bushes, it takes heavy duty leather gloves to pull those suckers out)

um, yea…I forgot to water
for about 3 weeks….
oops

and something got my day lilies

or maybe lack of something,
we have been having water issues
(that is another post, for another time)


this is what happens when squash bugs find your squash plants

they die!

this is the lovely view from my back door
and empty rabbit hutch
(this also is another post for another time)

so, I am having a problem growing bushes in my yard

a big problem and see we have this little family of squirrels that scamper around the yard
and they love to dine on my sunflowers

by pulling them down to the ground and eating the seed!

ARGH


the entrance to the shed
don’t trip


dead flowers


and
weeds
weeds
weeds!



No wonder I have so many darn weeds
When there is a zilllion acers of weeds bumping up against the back of your yard what can a gal expect!

Herbs

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I have always had herbs growing my garden, and I sort of, kind of used them. In the summertime mostly I would go pick them occasionally to go in a dish or something. When I decided that I wanted to try to have a more self sufficient life I took a hard look at my gardening and my herbs. I was wasting the good herbs in my garden and buy them from the store. Not very self sufficient or frugal. So this summer I decided I was going to harvest, dry and store herbs for use during the winter. This is the first time I have done this, so it is still a bit of an experiment. I don’t have a lot that can be stored and used for cooking, but next year I plan to add more herbs to my garden.
I have two little patched of Chamomile, one of these I just planted new this year. As long as you keep the flowers harvested they will bloom all summer. I like this plant because it is so pretty, it blends in easily with bedding plants.

That little bushy thing is some coconut thyme. It really doesn’t taste like coconut, it just had a little white variegation on the leaves. I would have rather harvested “Mother of Thyme”, but for some reason those plants didn’t do well this year, so I decided to leave them alone. I love Thyme, there are so many different varieties (the creeping thyme is only used as an ornamental plant) and they are so beautiful in a landscape.


That is Sage. I like to harvest the top leaves that are small and tender. There are many different varieties of Sage also, they are beautiful as regular landscape plantings too.


Good old Parsley. I have gotten tons of this bush.

This is Basil. I don’t use Basil very much, I really should learn how. Basil is a very tender plant and doesn’t stand up to cold weather very well at all. A light frost will kill it dead. Needless to say, this is not a perennial in Utah.


This is a handful of Chamomile blossoms I just harvested. I drink a lot of Chamomile tea in the winter and I was hoping to get enough to support my habit, but I didn’t. Next year when the new plant is in full bloom I will do better. This winter I am going to crush them and add them to homemade soap along with some Lavender I got out of my yard this June.

I laid them all out on my back steps on top of a clean flour sack towel. I covered them with another towel and weighted the edges down with rocks. When the afternoon temps are in the high 90’s I can expect the herbs to take a day and a half to dry. Now that things are a tad cooler it is taking about 2 and a half days.


Here they are after they sat out all weekend. We had a busy weekend and they sat outside a little longer than I liked, so the color washed out a bit.

Usually the basil is still a bright green, but being in the sun so long bleached them. The sent and flavor is still good.

Parsley

Chamomile

I have been storing them in old jars that I have been collecting.

I think they look rather pretty

I have been putting the jars in my pantry where it is cool and dark to preserve color and flavor

It has been kind of fun collection and preserving my herbs, I plan to do more next year.

There are many different ways to dry and store herbs. You can use a dehydrator or tie them in a bunch and hang them upside down . Some people will freeze their fresh herbs in ice cube trays, or just freeze them in zip lock baggies. There are many different methods, and they all are very rewarding.

How does her garden grow….

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I harvested a bunch of carrots yesterday evening. I figured they would be good in the kids lunches. They looked so pretty here fresh out of the garden I had to take a picture, then I realised that I hadn’t posted garden pictures for a long time.

My boxes have been doing wonderfully, there are a few thing I will do different, but for the most part I have been very pleased.

You can see in this box below the broccoli had pretty much taken over the entire box. I have never grown broccoli before so I didn’t realize how big they got, I will definitely grow them next year, I will just allocate more space! The onions are getting big, although they did get blown over in a wind storm the other night. I planted them from seed and a bunch didn’t come up, next year I will be either buying starters or planting my own indoors. I have already harvested all the spinach and lettuce out of this box, there is still some chard and a kohlrabi and a little bitty basil plant.

This box has mainly carrots. This is after I pulled that bunch in the above picture, so there is still a lot left. Those two baby cabbages are ready to pick and I have little ones on either side that I planted a few weeks ago when the ones before were picked. In the back of the box I had sweet peas, and they were lovely! However they had passed their prime so I pulled them. I also have some boc choi behind the carrots and some more broccoli, both are cool weather plants and since we can go into November some years with out a hard freeze I thought I would give it a try.

This beauty is one of my potato plants.

This is the potato box. They have done really well, I am hoping that under the big beautiful bushes are some big beautiful potatoes.

These are my beets. We have picked some and they are delicious! I love that you can eat the greens and the beet too. I need to pull them all in the next few days and put them up. I have never canned beets before, so it will be an adventure.

This is another view of the beet box. The other side had beans, but they didn’t do so well. I pulled them up and planted boc choi (Chinese cabbage) they are just starting to come up.

This is my patch of Summer Squash. They have done pretty good, they haven’t been as prolific as I had hoped, we have been battling squash bug all summer. I have gotten quite a bit frozen for the winter time, so I can’t complain.

This is my tomato patch, big beautiful GREEN fruit that won’t turn red…sigh…I just can’t grow tomatoes!
I planted the whole back of my yard with squash and they have been struggling, a few got munched by squash bug and the season was short this year, I did get a few winter squash, and if the fall is warm I might get a couple more.

This is a Queensland Blue pumpkin, I can’t wait until it is all the way ripe and take a picture for all of you to see, it is a beautiful squash.

and last, but not least, my number 1 super duper garden helper! She is always willing to do whatever I need done and she loves cutting my herbs for drying, but that is another post.

An Egg

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I have been getting eggs from my two small chickens, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum for about three weeks now, so I knew that the larger chickens would been coming along soon.

Yesterday I got my
first

large
green
egg!
Easter Eggs in July
On another note, the neighbor that gave us some apricots this weekend got weary of making jam and gave us the rest of the fruit. So I have my slave punk #2 working on cutting up apricots. We are going to be making the most wonderful jam. I will post more on that later.