Yes, we "Can"

Summer Mix

Jay grew up canning veggies.  My family never did that, so I'm just learning how.  Luckily our friend Dwain, and his sister Fonda have been mentoring me, and reintroducing the art to Jay.  We just got back from a canning trip to Western North Carolina at Dwain's mountain house in Clyde.  We originally planned on canning bush beans in June when we were there, but the beans weren't quite ready yet.  We lucked out on this trip, because we were able to find fresh local beans  in addition to the tomatoes, okra, onions and corn that we had planned on canning.  We also canned 5 pounds of boiled peanuts, and were a little disappointed that the peanuts we bought in Georgia came from New Mexico.  So much for local!

Dwain and Jay.  And Beans.

Beans

Beans going in the Canner

We started with 2 bushels of green beans, which yielded 46 quarts canned.  Dwain's house is the perfect setting for this, with balconies overlooking the mountain.  In order to not heat up the house, we used a propane turkey cooker on one of the balconies for the canning, and for our prep area as well.  The weather was perfect - about 80 during the day and high 50s at night. His house is in the very center of this photo.  We took it across the valley last time in June.

Dwain's house from across the valley

Boiled Peanuts = Crack

Next, we made boiled peanuts.  They turned out fantastic. I ate an entire pint of them myself the other night when I was nursing my sprained ankle.  Nothing better for a sprained ankle than a crapload of salty goodness, I always say!

Fonda with her mad tomato skills

Jay prepping Summer Mi

Finally came the tomatoes!  In all, we canned 125 pounds of tomatoes in various forms:  whole, juiced, and in summer mix, which has tomato chunks, sliced okra, vidalia onions and fresh shucked silver queen corn.   We cold-packed the whole tomatoes and the juice, and pressure cooked the summer mix.  Having many hands helped made this so much fun.  I love learning from Fonda and Dwain, and spending time with Jay preparing good food for us to share. When all was said and done, we had 140 quarts of food to bring back home.  We had brought up several dozen boxes of jars, and ended up having to buy more from Tractor Supply (we bought them out of wide mouths) and Ingles (a local grocery store).   I also picked up two canning cookbooks, Put 'Em Up by Sherri Books Vinton, and The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving so I can start dreaming about what we'll try next.  Fonda always brings fantastic food she grows in Illinois. She made some out-of-this-world creamed corn that I'd love to try my hand at if I can make it with non-cow dairy products.  I'm really grateful to Fonda and Dwain for sharing their 'tribal knowledge' and helping us nourish our bodies and our lives with yummy food goodness!  I'm also grateful that my sweet husband and I have so many shared interests.  It would be hard to do this without his help and ability to pick up extremely heavy canners full of mason jars and boxes full of canned produce. 

We're Egg-static!

Yes, we've joined the ranks of the Backyard Chicken Egg Producers.  2/3 of our hens are producing eggs!  Phyllis started first, about two weeks ago, and Pearl started shortly afterward.  So far Sylvia is very interested in the process, but she has not started laying yet.  I'm going to get her a copy of "Are You There, God, It's Me Margaret" so she won't feel like she's all alone in the world while the rest of the girls are developing ahead of her.

This picture shows our first 7 eggs.  the larger one in the lid of the container is one of the farm fresh eggs we get from Lancaster's our Produce Club Farm I'm a little bummed that our eggs aren't blue/green, because I thought that Ameracaunas always lay blue/green eggs, but a friend of mine told me that they might not lay that color right from the start, so we'll have to just wait and see.

Jay made a fabulous egg scramble for us this weekend, with mushrooms, tomatoes and fresh basil from the garden.  The egg shells are really crisp and hard, and the yolks are very firm and a gorgeous golden color.  They sit up really high and don't get all runny. 

Chicks, Chickens and Chickpeas

finished product

Chicks (like me) who try to eat healthfully and feed their chickens healthfully, can use chickpeas to do both. I eat chickpeas in a lot of ways - in salads, soups, hummus, falafel and my favorite way: roasted.  The chickens really like chickpeas, too, only they take 'em straight from the can.

People who know me well know that my favorite food group is 'brown and crunchy' just like my favorite color is 'paisley.' Roasted Chickpeas area a large part of my plan to eat well and satisfy my quest for 'brown and crunchy' in a healthy way. I get an added protein boost and just love the crunch.  I've had some friends ask me to post my roasted chickpea recipe, so I decided to do that today.

rinse and drain

Preheat oven to 425. I take a can or two of organic Chickpeas, rinse them and drain in a colander.  I like to buy Eden brand because they don't have BCPs in their lining.  Transfer to a layer of towels on a foil-lined jelly roll pan to dry.  Once dry, I remove the towels and roast in the oven for about 15  minutes on the foil lined pan.

drain on towels

Take chickpeas out of the oven and dump them in a mixing bowl, and drizzle with olive oil.  I add Greek Seasoning from V-Spicery, a locally owned spice shop and sea salt to taste, then return to the oven for another round of roasting, 15 minutes or so.  Stir and return to oven again, another 15 minutes until they get really brown and crunchy. This part is really subjective.  I like mine REALLY brown and REALLY crunchy.  Some days it takes 30 minutes, some days it takes 45 minutes, depending on the humidity.  Shake, stir and sample A LOT, while you are obtaining the right amount of brown-ness for you.  Watch out when sampling, though. I got a really bad chick-pea-sized burn on the inside of my lower lip last time - that olive oil is HOT!  Cool and store in an air-tight container.

add seasoning

bake and stir

Chicken Update: while I have your attention... the chickens have decided to go back to putting themselves to bed at night again, and have started eating again.  We realized they prefer eating off a flat surface like a cement block instead of out of their feeder.  We found a feeder they like better, and replaced their waterer, too.  Both seem to be more accepted than the old ones.  We also switched feed, and they like the new stuff (Manna Pro) better than the last kind.  I thought that Sylvia was going to be giving us our first egg a couple of weekends ago, but it turned out to be a false alarm.  She was walking around, bitching, two or three days in a row.  I know it's really hot here, and that the heat might be causing the delay in their egg production. Here is a <30-second video of Sylvia having PMS:

 

Mild Chicken Worry

I’ve started to get a little anxious that if our chickens crossed the road, they’d have to take the short bus to get there.

It’s been a month or so since I’ve posted anything new on the blog.  Not a lot has been going on between Jay and I both taking turns being sick and it being hot as Hades outside.  The girls will be 6 months old on 7/31, so we should get eggs soon after that, I hope.  Jay finished off the nesting boxes for them, and I put in the wooden ‘inspiration’ eggs for them.  And now we wait.

 While we’re waiting, my worries grow a little each day.  Why, when after 3 months of putting themselves in the hen-house at night, do Sylvia and Pearl want to camp out on the ladder outside (that’s not big enough for all of them) instead of going in their house?  Phyllis is left conflicted about this, because she wants to go in the hen-house at night on her own, but doesn’t want to stay there by herself, so she does laps from the ladder to the hen-house and back again.   I know they’re ‘just chickens.’  But the spot they’ve chosen to sleep on at night now is not weather-safe.

Pearl on the Ladder

There is nothing to protect them from getting drenched in our coming-down-sideways rains if I leave them out on the ladder.  And I don’t want them to get sick and not know what to do with them or even know they are sick until it’s too late.  Not to mention that they have to take turns actually sleeping because the ladder is wide enough for exactly 2 and one half chickens to roost.  Someone has to stand up if the other two are settled in.  So out we go, at dusk every night, with a container of bulgur wheat to coax them up in the hen-house.  Or worse, have to relocate them and chase them around squawking and getting all overheated (them, not us.) Once we shut the door (which we didn’t used to do once they started going in there on their own a few months ago) they get all pissy and upset and fret over the door being closed.  I can just picture them dragging tin cups along the wire, chanting, “Let us out, you filthy Screws!!”  Prisoner: Cell Block H: The Poultry Yard.  Then, to save time in the morning, we have to go back outside before we go to bed to open the door back up so they can get out on their own by themselves and not wait for one of us to get up.

Then there is the food situation.  I have this 4 page list of things I got off of Backyard Chickens that people (and their poultry) deem as good and proper chicken treats.  Ours won’t eat any of it.  Ours like bulgur wheat and Swiss chard.  They ate cucumber guts once.  Never again.  All these tried-and-true yummy things, including watermelon, cabbage, and darn-near anything leftover that other people’s chickens eat, ours won’t touch.  If I bring them something they are not familiar with, or have decided they don’t like, they pace around it in a circle, muttering a slow suspicious, ‘buck buck buck BUUUUUUUUck’ and eye it sideways.  Always slow, always 4 'bucks' with the last one drawn out and wary.

Phyllis being Suspicious

Phyllis will always come up to check it out, but if she won’t eat it, the other two won’t even try.  Strawberries? Nope. Tomatoes? Nope. Even things they liked a month ago like Spanish nettle weeds and their own food they all of a sudden don’t want to eat.  On top of that, they’re big girls now, so we switched them to layer feed instead of growing feed.  Not so much.  They don’t like that, either.  If they were picky toddlers, they’d be living off chicken nuggets and fries.  The irony is not lost on me.  Their version of that is scratch grains and black oil sunflower seeds.

Sylvia

Next comes the heat.  It’s, like I said, hotter than Hades here.  And humid.  They are panting most of the time.  So I go off to look up what other people do on Backyard Chickens and try some of the suggestions.  1. Pan of cool water for them to step into because if their feet are cool, their whole bodies will cool off.  Nope.  Water pans elicit the same suspicious sideways-glancing, ‘buck buck buck BUUUUUUUck’ as undesirable food does.  And apparently it's VERY SCARY to accidentally step into it while running after a bug, knocking the pan over and spraying water everywhere.  Frozen plastic jugs of ice set in a big Rubbermaid bin tipped over on its side.  Like a walk-in AC chamber.   Nope.  Spritzing them off with water.  Boy howdy were they offended by that!  People in dry hot climates use those mister-fan things, but in Florida that doesn’t actually cool anything off. It just makes it more humid and sticky and harder to breathe.  We’re discussing finding a way to put a fan out there, that at least might get the air moving a little and cool things off.   At 2:00 every afternoon I go out and unroll a roll-up shade to give them some relief from the afternoon sun and put out a few frozen water jugs over in the coolest part of the coop.  I don’t know if they realize it or not that they can sit closer to them and cool off a bit, but I feel like I’m at least trying to give them some relief. 

I had no idea there was this much crap to worry about with chickens.  I thought they’d be little low-maintenance garbage disposals that had a happy edible by-product for us.  Everyone else seems to have chickens like that.  Tammy’s chickens are 2 or 3 weeks younger than ours and are already laying eggs!  We’ve got eccentric high-maintenance, low-achieving short-bus chickens that seem to defy all the chicken conventional wisdom. I feel like there is something I’m missing… something that I’m not doing right, or enough of, for them to succeed.  I don’t want my chickens to get an Attendance Award.  I want them to Graduate with Honors!  Hell, at this rate I’d settle for a happy productive C-student chickens.

Where is The Chicken Whisperer when you need him?

Eating Local, Even When You're Not

Local, that is.  Preserving and canning some of our local produce, as well as supporting a CSA and growing our own food also contribute to our goal to eat this way.  Even the cats get to take advantage of the catnip we produce in our own back yard.  Recently we canned 4 bushels of field peas, varieties like Black Eyed, Conch, Zipper Cream and Purple Hulled Crowders.  We got these peas about an hour after they were harvested, and had them all canned by the end of the day.  It's hard work, made much easier by using our friend's commercial pea sheller. 

In the last few weeks we also traveled to Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.  We managed to eat locally everywhere we went. Not every meal, but as many as we could, when we could. 





In Arizona, we went to Queen Creek Olive Mill and toured the orchard, garden and olive oil press room.  They grew a lot of veggies and herbs under shade cloth, and featured locally raised produce in their cafe along with the olive oil.  We had some olive oil cupcakes and gelato and brought some of their signature blend and chocolate olive oil back with us.

While in NC, we went berry picking at The Ten Acre Garden.  Actually, Jay, Dwain and Fonda went berry picking. I was sick and took pictures of everyone else picking.  Between us, we picked 4 quarts of raspberries and blackberries.  Jay made a pie with ours, and Fonda and Dwain made freezer jam with theirs.

On this trip, Dwain also brought peaches and tomatoes from his garden in Plant City, and Fonda brought eggs, milk, pork and squash from her farm in Illinois.  With all the canned goods already stored in Dwain's mountain kitchen, we were able to eat 'locally' most of the time we were there.  On Wednesday mornings, there is a small Farmer's Market in Waynesville that we visited.  Unfortunately, we timed it wrong and were not able to get Bush Beans.  We were about a week or two too early for them to be at market.  We did manage to obtain quite a few baked goods that morning. One of the best items was a Squash and Calendula Blossom yeast bread.  It was light and fluffy and just slightly sweet.  We spotted an English Toffee store on our way out of the Farmer's Market, so of course we had to stop there to do a quality control check on the locally-produced candy.  When we got back to Dwain's house, we were able to spread fresh butter that Fonda had just made as well as the fresh jam on that fantastic squash bread.

Our favorite meal on the whole trip was at The Purple Onion in Saluda, NC.  My pilates teacher told me about this little place, so we made a special trip to Saluda to check it out.  I had locally caught mountain trout roasted in corn husks and served with heirloom veggie salsa.  Jay had locally raised organic chicken and roasted heirloom veggies.  We shared a blackberry cobbler that was out of this world.  As a special treat, we also got to listen to 4 locally-grown singer-songwriters that night.

Even on the way home, when we stopped at a roadside stand for peaches, corn, tomatoes and of course, hot boiled peanuts, we partook of what the local farmers had to offer. Spending time in a place like Western NC, where the vibe is definitely more rural and committed to agriculture inspires me to continue to support local farmers, and fuels my desire to move up there and be a part of that life. I think it inspires Jay, too.  He was quite taken with the tractors at the Farm Supply Store....

Sad Day in Squash Land......

I hate quitting.  Giving up.  Surrendering. But if gardening doesn't teach you anything else, it'll teach you that sometimes the little guy wins.  Little guys like Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers, Powdery Mildew and Sooty Mold.  And even some sort of unidentified angular trapezoidal squash bug thing. 

So it's with a heavy heart and a sad sigh that I say a fond farewell to my hydroponic squash plants.  Goodbye zucchini.  You gave me 4 really good squashes before you succumbed to powdery mildew.  Goodbye yellow and white patty pan.  You tried really hard to get going, but the fungus got to you before I could.  Goodbye yellow "One Ball" squash.  I was very excited about your first BIG squash, and sad to see the rest of them wither and die. 

You, "Tromboncino."  I will miss you most of all.  You promised three feet of bright green zucchini-like goodness.  You looked a bit like a marital aid.  You, of all the varieties, looked like you were fighting better than the rest.  I have 5 of your baby squash to try in a meal this weekend to remember you by.  I thought it best to harvest what I could before we took you out of the bin.

I'm sorry we didn't realize you all were fighting for your lives before it was too late.  I've learned that if we are going to plant you again, it'll be during a cooler time, and with more air flow around you.  And we'll start preventative spraying with worm tea from the start, because that's more effective than trying to halt fungus and mildew  once it's already in progress. 

On the bright side, your free-ranging volunteer patty-pan cousin is doing really well (so far).  He's HUGE, and while is has a few leaves showing powdery mildew, and we've lost a few baby squashes to sooty mold, he seems to be bravely and happily holding his own in the yard... never been watered, never been fertilized except for two applications of worm tea.  He's often covered in Lubbers and something has laid eggs on his huge leaves.  He might be dead by the time we get back from Arizona, but for now, he's a real trooper.

Onward.  Today, the squash plants will be replaced with yard-long Chinese Red Noodle Beans and Super Sugar Snap Peas.  We'll keep a close eye on the cucumbers that were in the bins next to the squash, because they can be susceptible to the same things that got the squash.  We managed to get a good number of cukes last year, so maybe our luck will continue this year.

Another day, another humbling garden lesson learned.

Allow me to show you my bloomers

Ahem.  Now that I've got your attention...  Here is what's blooming in our daylily garden today.

I'm a garden geek.  People who barely know me understand that pretty quickly.  What goes even deeper than my love of growing things in general is the soft spot I have for the  daylily.  We actually don't grow any other plants that are this ornamental and non-functional.  I love that it's a different bloom every day, on a different plant every day, for several months in a row.  There is nothing like going outside first thing in the morning before it's so ungodly hot and seeing who is there to meet you in the garden.  Sometimes it's a double, like Affair D'Amour, or a spider like Chevron Spider.

                                                                                                                                                              

Sometimes it's a bi-color like Athlone, or one with pinched sepals like Cameroons.

This is our best year for daylilies yet.  I think the cold snap really gave them a break and let them rest up so they could put on a show for us this year.  Of course it wasn't in time for THE show, but still.  We get a private performance every day, and will until possibly September.

I can't take any of the credit for them being this healthy and happy.  Jay does all the hard work. I am generally the one who picks them out, and sometimes I point here or there, but in the last year I've been pretty 'careless' in my placement.
When we first started, I was SOOOO detailed and persnickety about making sure I didn't have two pinks together, and that I had the big ones in the back, and the earlies mixed in with the mid- and late-seasons.  As the years have worn on, I've realized that the tall ones don't necessarily bloom the same time as the shorter ones, so it doesn't matter (to me) if they're in the back or not.  I'm just happy to see each of them whenever and wherever they decide to come out and play.  I used to be very detailed in my tags, too.   At first, I noted the variety name, the hybridizer, year of introdution, height, size, season and genetic type.  The last batch we came home with got the name of the variety and hybridizer and the year of introduction.  I became less obsessive about the technical details and more laid back about them and just being glad they are growing and blooming.  If I ever want to dabble in hybridizing, the details will be important, but for now, knowing the name and the hybridizer is probably good enough.

We have about 100 named varieties and probably half again as many unnamed/unidentified or seedlings of unknown parentage (daylily bastards) as well.  Most  of them are in pots over by the chicken coop because they were in the yard near or in the same spot the coop was going to be, so we moved them into a shadier area during construction.  Another raised bed has only daylilies and the occasional weed.  Jay is going to build raised beds for all the potted ones so they'll get the benefits of more root room like their raised bed buddies. Once all of them have permanent homes, I'll do a good inventory and get an accurate count. 

We're also fostering about 60 plants left over from our show and sale.  With much luck, they'll be ready to sell at our booth at Greenfest next March.  Every time I think we're out of room and can't possibly get more, we come home from Greenfest, or our annual show, with a few new petal-y friends.  One I can't wait to meet is called Android Dreams, that one of my favorite people in the whole wide world hybridized.  It looks like rainbow sherbet.  Hand to God.  It's got a scape on it now, so in the next few weeks, we'll get to see if it's as happy here as it was in Plant City.  The spot where the recently-removed ficus trees is MUCH larger than I thought.  I be we could fit another couple hundred daylilies in there, but nobody would ever get to see them.