Good Morning, Glory

My morning glories have actually made it to the blooming stage. They've wound their way up only half the height of their trellis but each morning when I make my tour of the garden, I'm greeted with a few more beautiful purple blossoms. So pretty.

Yesterday I picked our first yellow beans. (Remember when they used to call them "butter beans"?) My daughter stopped by on her way home from a town day late yesterday so I sent them with her for them to enjoy. This afternoon I checked the plants again and picked these few more that were ready. They'll be enough to have with our dinner tonight. Just beef patties, yellow beans and sweet potatoes (no, not from our garden -- darn). And for dessert Blueberry Crunch made with berries from our blueberry patch. Not as flavorful as wild blueberries (which are prolific in our area this year) but pretty yummy, all the same.

Talk about being totally oblivious to what's going on in your own garden! I've been glancing at the two rows of pickling cucs noticing lots of pretty little yellow blossoms and the lush, dark green vines that are only about two feet high. For some reason, when I was in the garden an hour or so ago, I got down on my hands and knees and took a peek inside the vines. Omigosh. I have enough cucs for more than two (possibly three) batches of pickles. I'm not upset about some of them being overly big because I had decided to make my sliced Bread and Butter Pickles first since my dill hasn't grown big enough yet to use in making the dill pickles.

You know where you can find me tomorrow morning. I'll be making pickles, pickles . . . and a few more pickles.

Making Sourdough Bricks

I'm trying to learn how to make sourdough bread. I ordered some sourdough starter a couple of weeks back and attempted my first loaf last week.

The starter was rye sourdough starter but the instructions said you could use any flour when making bread. Rye was okay with me as we like rye bread a lot. Even though I know that rye flour contains very little gluten and doesn't rise well without the incorporation of at least some white flour, I went ahead and used all rye flour. Again, the instructions said that would be okay. (Why do I believe things just because someone writes them down and prints them out?) I even ground a batch of rye grains up so the flour would be fresh and "live."

Go ahead and chuckle if you must. This is what my first loaf of sourdough bread looked like. Yeah, quite brick-like, I would say. Roy is eating it and says the flavor is good (bless his little heart), but I think he's just desperate for homemade bread as I haven't been giving top priority to bread baking this summer.

Last night, I "refreshed the sourdough" culture -- must be done weekly -- so all was ready for another go at it this morning. Decided until I got the hang of this sourdough thing, I would use 3/4 spelt flour and 1/4 unbleached white. Spelt is an old, old variety of wheat which hasn't been as modified and/or corrupted over the years as much as most wheat has so I thought that would give us some nice spelt (whole wheat) sourdough bread.

And here is today's loaf. Gee, looks like I can not only make Rye Sourdough Bricks but now I've added Spelt Sourdough Bricks to my repertoire. Oh, my. I had to let it rise 5 hours in the bowl before it looked like it had risen even a little bit (certainly not double in size as the recipe suggested) and then 4 more hours in the loaf pan to get it to barely reach the top of the pan. (Good thing I started early this morning, huh?) Wonder what I'm doing wrong? I know I had it in a warm enough place for rising to take place. Roy has been kind enough to suggest the starter I got isn't good. Wonder how many more times I should try this before giving up?

I really do know how to bake bread. Just apparently not sourdough bread. Oh, well. Cement slabs, anyone?

The Bee Man

Roy checked our honey bees this afternoon and found things to be looking good.

Here he's "smoking" the bees to calm them down before taking the hive apart.

Opening the hive and looking to see what condition the hive and bees are in.

A nice, heavy brood pattern which indicates a healthy, vigorous queen is in the hive.

This past winter wasn't an easy one for the bees. There aren't a great number of beekeepers in our area but nearly everyone lost some hives; quite a few lost all of theirs. We went into winter with eight hives; we lost four. Why? It's always a conundrum when it comes to beekeeping Up North.

Although the winter wasn't extremely cold, it was a very gray and sunless one. The bees need a few sunny, warm days over the winter months in which to take critical cleansing flights. This could have been a problem this year. Or perhaps there weren't enough bees in the hives to generate enough heat to keep themselves warm. When Roy checked first thing early this spring, there was still honey in the hives we lost which means they didn't starve.

Last year at this time we had had about nine swarms. This year we haven't had one. What's the difference between last summer and this one? A month of cool, wet early summer weather that kept the bees dormant because of poor flying conditions and lack of available food. That in turn made the first-of-the-season build-up of bees and hives go much slower.

So far, Roy's managed to build the bees back up to seven hives. He reports three are quite strong and four are only moderately so. Three of the new hives were started from scratch by making nucs and splits.

A nuc is made by taking a couple of frames of brood along with young bees sitting on the brood and putting them into a small box with a few frames of honey and pollen for food to help things get going during the time the bees build themselves up. The bees, incredibly enough, take a started worker egg and put it in a specially constructed cell. Then they make a "magical" food called royal jelly and fill the cell with that. The emerging larva feeds on the royal jelly and instead of turning into a worker bee, she becomes a new queen bee. The nuc can then be used to establish a complete new hive.

A split is taking one strong hive and dividing it into two hives forcing the bees in the second (new hive) to raise their own new queen in the same way described above.

I readily admit Roy is the bee expert in the family. I do know bees are fascinating creatures to study because of their many unique traits, social behaviors, and incredible beneficial aspects to farmers, gardeners and our environment as a whole. There is much more to understanding bees than I have the brain cells to absorb. I gladly leave that aspect of our homestead to The Bee Man in the house.

Send Help

The garden is going great guns and I'm outta gas. All of a sudden (not really, I've been waiting over two months for this), more than I can handle needs to be harvested and processed.

Yesterday I picked our first six slicing cucumbers. Sent all but one with the box of produce to the restaurant and I can see there will be several more today. Also had our largest delivery of mixed salad lettuce yesterday. Just short of eight pounds. All our lettuce is gourmet baby lettuce . . . imagine how much one leaf of baby lettuce weighs. So how many of those little leaves does it take to make up eight pounds? A lot. An amazing lot. Also sent baby Swiss chard and possibly the last of the snow peas.

I pulled all of the shell pea vines on Wednesday as they were done, done, done. The vines went to some happy chickens. Here's the naked trellising still standing (I haven't gotten that down yet) with the sunflowers behind. With the lush pea vines gone, I'm hoping the sunflowers will get more sunshine and grow a little faster than they have been.

I had planned on making some jam with the raspberries in the refrig that I had picked two days ago. But yesterday looking at my list for the day, I knew it wasn't gonna happen so I spread the berries on cookie sheets and froze them. Here's a sheet of them frozen solid and ready to be shoveled into freezer bags. Freezing this way keeps them individualized; they don't smoosh together. I can make jam with them at a later date or most likely we'll use them as the fruit sweetener in smoothies this winter.

Last night after dinner, I had to pick raspberries again. Also picked a small amount of blueberries and combined them with the raspberries and then made a batch of Blueberry-Raspberry Jam today. Mmmm, good.

This bush doesn't have many blueberries on it but the berries sure make a pretty picture.

I had to plant beans twice this year as most of the first planting rotted in the ground. When I did the second planting, I left the few of the first plants that did sprout. Now those have inch long beans on them so I know it won't be long before I'll be blanching green and yellow beans for the freezer. Also planted some French fillet beans, which are my husband's favorite, but they don't freeze well at all, so we'll eat them fresh and send some to the restaurant.

So you see, just when I've given my all to get the garden to this point, it's rewarding my efforts with an abundance of beautiful produce . . . and I feel overwhelmed and under-powered. I've used up all my oompf. Gardening is hard work . . . especially if you strive to grow enough veggies to can, freeze and process to take you through to the next growing season, plus some extra to sell.

Okay, you can send in the harvest crew now. Has anyone seen that person who's gonna work full time in my kitchen to process everything? And, oh yeah, do you know of anyone who does windows and would clean my bathroom?

Lo and Behold

Here it is, folks. Our first ripe tomato!

Hrumpf, you say. That's a mighty puny excuse for a tomato. Au contraire, mon cheri, I say. This isn't a regular size tomato. It's one honkin' big (as you can see by the comparison to one of our eggs) cherry tomato.

The cherry tomatoes usually do ripen before the regular ones, and this variety - the Washington Cherry - has always been a good one for us in our garden. The plants have had approximately two gazillion green tomatoes in evidence for ages and are so big I can no longer completely close down the cold frame tops at night to give them maximum protection from the cooler air. I kept wondering when one of the tomatoes would turn just a little orange, please? Well, finally last Thursday, July 31st, this one started to color up. And once it got started, it didn't take too long to fully ripen. I picked it yesterday.

This is the year I'm supposed to grow enough full sized tomatoes to harvest so I can can my year's supply of stewed tomatoes. I've got cold frames over three garden beds with full size tomatoes in them and seventeen plastic wrapped wire cages where a variety of heirloom tomatoes are living in comfort. Although I see lots of blossoms, unless I'm missing something, I can find only a few tomatoes, mostly about 3" across and very green.

The only people I've ever heard of who have grown enough tomatoes up here to can are those with greenhouses. I know I've never come close to managing the feat. When we lived in Illinois, the first October frost that killed the tomato plants was almost welcomed. By that time I had made and preserved every possible tomato product I could think of. We had stewed tomatoes galore, catsup, tomato sauce, paste and juice, salsa, on and on. Ah, to have even half of one of those harvests up here in the frozen tundra. Sigh.

You'll have to excuse me now. I'm going to go sit down at the kitchen table and enjoy our first tomato of the season. I'll even share!

Stealing Spuds

I know. I said I wasn't going to do it this year . . . but I just couldn't stop myself.

Supposedly when potato plants blossom, the potatoes underneath have sized up enough that you can dig a few to use as "new potatoes." These little guys won't keep like the more mature ones will but, boyohboyohboy, they are soooo good parboiled and sprinkled with fresh cut chives and butter. Directly from the garden to dinner plate in 20 minutes.

Last year I pilfered so many new potatoes that Roy said our main harvest was severely affected. So this year I wasn't going to steal even enough for one meal. But tonight's dinner is Swiss steak and gravy I had in the freezer along with fresh snow peas picked this morning and, well, what would be better with that than just a few new potatoes?

I just couldn't stop myself.