Summer might just be a memory, but this is the time of year that here in the U.S.A. we celebrate the things that we are thankful for, and we celebrate with food and our bountiful harvests from the previous growing season. This year, 2020, may have been a strange year, but one thing that I am thankful for is that
Ever have those summers where you’ve got so many tomatoes that you don’t know what to do with them and you can’t even give them away? (It seems like that happens to me every year now-days.) If this sounds like a familiar problem to you, you should try making tomato sauce… It’s really easy, takes only a half hour, and
Making homemade raisins takes a lot of work and takes a full two days of running the dehydrator on medium-high heat, but the raisins are so flavorful and different than what you buy at the store! For these raisins, I had two paper grocery sacks of purple seedless concord grapes, a full stack of 10 dehydrator trays, and that equated
Basil I have found to be one of the trickier herbs to preserve by drying. It is fragile and has a tendency to mold, turn black or lose all flavor and taste like ash! There are so many times I have wasted a good batch of basil harvest to poor drying results… Blegh! So here is the most reliable way
Every year we have more herbs in the garden than we can use up before the weather turns and the leaves get gross or drop off the plant. Most years we dehydrate (or dry) at least a little bit of our harvest in the last couple of weeks that we have nice weather so that we can enjoy the herby
This year was a great year for pumpkin farmers! (Ok, I’m just guessing on that one, but the pumpkin patches around this neck of the woods were bursting at the seams with families hunting for the perfect jack-o-lantern material this year–saw it with my own eyes!) Because we weren’t sure how Covid was going to affect Halloween, people planned a
Last fall we tossed a bumpy green pumpkin out into the garden to compost (and get picked apart by animals) and this spring, up came a squash-y looking plant near that spot. Several months (and many flowers) went by and eventually the little plant put on one, medium sized, olive green pumpkin. We left it alone until the cold weather
Poinsettias are a classic, festive indoor plant to have in the house during the holidays. Most people enjoy them for a month or two while they bloom, then the plants begin to drop their leaves and they begin to look tattered and tired. At this point, most people chuck them in the garbage can. It doesn’t have to be that
Even with the chickens running around all spring, when I put in the garden, I always have to bait the heck out of it to keep the snails and slugs from eating every leave that comes up. I really don’t like spreading poison around, and I’m always looking for new ways to keep pests at bay without having to poison.
Right up until a couple of weeks ago, we were still getting a beautiful harvest from the garden, when a hard freeze was forecast for the evenings. Then we knew we were either going to lose all of the hot peppers (which had not yet ripened) and the rest of the basil, which was not yet bolting. Since we were
