Carrot Manicure

Today has been a day of canning.  I received a good chunk of HUGE carrots from a friend and I decided to try canning them.  My vintage pressure canner only does 4 pints at a time so this took awhile.  After a morning of cleaning, cutting and canning 11 pints of carrots my nails and hands have this strange new orange glow to them.  I must say it is different and not something I plan on sporting come Monday at the new job.

Yes, I said new job.  After a year of being an assistant teacher at the day care that my kids go to, I am moving on to the new center that my boss bought this last spring as the lead preschool teacher.  I am looking forward to this new challenge of new kids and parents, new setting and planning curriculum.  My kids are not sure they like the idea, but this means I get 40 hrs. a week and more income which helps during this very lean time.  The extra income also is a + now that our wonderful (not) Governor's budget crap has taken effect. Wonderful.  What is a family to do in their little corner of the world?  I guess I'll make some spaghetti sauce to store up and save.

Seeing as how my tomatoes that I had such high hopes for this summer have been plagued by to much rain at times, to much heat and cold at different points in there lives, blight and little chipmunks who like to each almost ripe fruit have petered out on me I am not sure how much sauce I am going to be able to put away this year.  Holy run on sentence.  My sister would be appalled.  Sorry but I don't care, I just tend to type how my brain thinks sometimes.  Anyway, I have finally been able to start my first batch of spaghetti sauce this afternoon and I am excited.  Right now it is simmering away and the house smells wonderful.  If I had access to about 16 gallons of tomatoes I would be set for spaghetti sauce for the year.  Yeah, that would be about 40 quarts of sauce when all said and done.  You would think we were Italian the way we eat spaghetti, nope, Norwegian, Danish and Chinese. 

With the last 30 minutes of simmering I am going to start warming up my BWB canner.  Happy farming, gardening, canning or what ever you do to pass the time. 

Creative "Free" Tomato Supports

My tomatoes are coming along really well and are now starting to need some support. I have the 8 tomato cages that I bought last year and they really didn't work well and with money being tight, I needed to get creative for the rest of my 50 some tomato plants.

Before:  The "small" tomato bed, better known as Adin's.

The supplies: large and small trimmers, hunting knife, twine, and maple poles cut from the woods.

After:  The first round of support put in.  More will be added as the plants grow. 

 I think that it looks kind of pretty and I'll use this method for all of my tomatoes.  It allows me to put up a support branch where ever I may need one, the materials were all on hand and it is all bio-degradable.  It does take a little time to do the tying of all the branches together, but that is ok.

Here are some updated pics from other parts of the garden:

Sugar Snap Peas on the left just starting to bloom and Shelling peas on the right with tons of nice pods.

Bush Beans: Green & Wax

Cucumbers with a second season Carrot and some volunteer Sunflowers.

Potatoes:  Blues and Reds (I have mounded twice now.)  I also have 2 garbage cans with blues.

Asparagus forest and a couple of tomatoes.

Asparagus Saying Hello



Ok, I know it is almost microscopic,
but I was excited.  I am looking forward
to 2012 to be able to harvest any.  Yum!

Yesterday afternoon when I got home from work, I decided to do some weeding of the die hard weeds that seemed to grow over the winter and discovered that my asparagus plants have poked their little faces out of the soil to say hello.  That was a wonderful discovery.  Now I just hope that they don't freeze tonight as it is currently snowing (again) and it is supposed to snow into tomorrow.  Yuck!  I guess that is what I get for living in Wisconsin and northern Wisconsin for that matter. 

All of my raised beds but one are ready to plant.  I do have to move my fence for my peas to climb over to the other side of the bed, that way I can make a pea tunnel between two beds.  Hope it works out.  Last summer the peas grew out of vertical climbing space so hopefully this will fix that. 

This weekend my sister told me that our tomato seedlings are doing well.  She always has great germination.  Between the 2 of us we have about 140 Roma seedlings.  I know I wanted lots of tomatoes for my spaghetti sauce and what not, but 70 plants for me will be a lot.  Good thing I can take some to work and let the day care kids plant some outside to watch them grow.  We also have cherry tomatoes and another slicer.  Holy tomatoes!  My pepper seedling are slowly coming along in my sun room.  Each day I find another one that has sprouted.  The pumpkins are going wild, had to pot them up about 2 weeks or so ago and my squash that I just started are also starting to sprout.  My sun room smells like a green house.  I love it.

Seeds Have Arrived!

My sister came down this weekend for my son's 5th Birthday party and brought my seeds with her.  We split a lot of the seed packets because some just have more than we need.  I know we could save them for another year on a lot of them, but this just works better for us.  So after our dividing the ones that we are sharing and her keeping some of the ones that she will start for both of us (because she has the small green house and ours isn't built yet) we are ready for spring.

My list of seeds include:
Peas: RSVPea for shelling and Sugar Snaps
Beans:  Burpee's Tenderpod and Gold Mine
Pumpkins: Dill's Monster,SuperFreak Goosebumps Hybrid, and Snack face Hybrid
Squash:  Waltham Butternut Heirloom & Buttercup
Gourds:  Gremlins and Goblin Egg
Carrots:  Atomic Red, Bambino, Cosmic Purple, Lunar White & Solar Yellow
Sweet Zuke Hybrid Zucchini
Baby Leaf Hybrid Spinach
Sweet Basil
Lettuce: Iceberg A & a leaf
Early Pride Hybrid Cucumber
Dimitri Hybrid Brussels Sprouts
Peppers: False Alarm, California Wonder, Sunbright, Horizon, Purple Beauty, Midnight Dreams, Chocolate Bell, White Belle and Lilac Bell
Dukat Dill
Granex Yellow Onions (grown from seed for green onions and sets for 2012)
Tomatoes:  Brandy Boy, Roma & a Cherry
Cilantro

I think that is it.  Looks pretty daunting, but I am excited.  I may add a thing or two as the time get's closer.  I am also getting seed potatoes and onion sets, but they are on back order.  We have this huge beautiful south facing deck that doesn't get much use, so I will be doing a bunch of container plantings up there with the leaf lettuce, herbs, some tomatoes and maybe I'll add some pole beans as my others that will go in the garden are bush varieties. 

Friday, Scott and Adin went and got our glass for the green house.  We got 10 panels of replacement patio door glass for $15 each.  Should work great.  The layout of the green house is once again changing in Scott's mind.  He is now thinking of having it longer and narrower, which is fine with me.  He has a picture in his head and it should work.  He is pretty meticulous when it comes to building so I'm sure it will be beautiful.  He even textured the concrete that he put down last fall for our split wood to sit on.  He is wonderful. 

Today is beautiful, but tomorrow is supposed to rain.  At least we should loose a lot of snow this weekend.  This afternoon I was actually able to get into the garden and dig up some carrots that have been overwintering in there.  I was amazed.  Other than being really dirty, they were still crisp and crunchy and not frozen.  I love it.  It is fun to be harvesting again. 

Peanuts Violated

So last night I went out to start digging into the reclaiming of the garden after the weekend and I discovered that my peanuts (who I had been babying and praying would produce) had been violated. Over the weekend something small got into the garden and ate all of my peanuts. Not the plants, those are still nicely planted, but there is a small trench all the way around every plant and beautiful peanut shells all over the garden. I am very sad. We so hoped to be able to make peanut butter this fall if we got any and here they actually grew peanuts and now they are gone. Dang Nabbit!

Today the girls and I are going to dive into another round of making pickles. Hopefully this batch turns out better then the first. We have 17 lbs. of cucumbers to pickle.

I have been searching for a good spaghetti sauce recipe so I am able to can up my tomatoes in it. Our family loves spaghetti so that is my plan for the tomatoes. If anyone has any suggestions, that would be great.

Here is the pics I promised of my start of the tomato harvest and my very sad little Adin after he kissed the tree. He is doing much better today.

Red

I now have the beautiful color of red in our garden. The tomatoes have started to ripen, even the huge tomatoes on our Tomato Tragedy plants from earlier this spring. It is truly amazing how tough these plants can be. I thought that after those storms earlier this summer pretty much took out the two tomato plants that I have in my asparagus bed that they were toast. I was wrong! I'm very glad. Those 2 plants have some of the biggest fruits on it that I have ever seen. And the mega blossom tomatoes, crazy. (sorry, no pictures. I left my camera charger in Ashland at my sister's after this weekend. No good.)

This is my week of reclaiming my garden. Now that I am finally done working at camp and have this week off before I start my new job at the day care, the kids and I are going to hit it hard (maybe not as hard as my son hit a tree yesterday while swinging on the tire swing at my sister's. I'll post more about that tomorrow with pics hopefully. He has a pretty sad little look now with a major fat lip and puffy nose.) The peas are coming out and maybe the beans, we'll have to see about that. I'm still hoping that the yellow bell pepper plants do something - as of now...not so much. The pumpkins have taken over, next year they will have a new home on the south side of the garden outside of the fence (seeing as how most of them have made their way that direction anyway) so I have more room for other things that don't become out of con troll as much as these have. I have a pumpkin forest.

Well, they guys are here to install our outdoor wood boiler, so I best get outside. One last note... if anyone has any good recipes or trick to canning pumpkin for later use (aka - pies) let me know. I think I'm going to have a bumper crop of pumpkins this year - more than what we'll need at Halloween.