End of the Weekend

I know I got a few things done this weekend (I MUST have, right?) but basically I feel as though I went backwards on the move ahead front. Two days of hot, hot weather with no rain. Besides it being simmery, sultry summer time out there, there are lots of small (and a couple of big) wildfires in Canada and we can smell the smoke the second we step outside.

Yesterday I did my first picking this season of the blueberries. I only got two cups but it's a start and they were wonderful. (Snarfed them right up, we did.)

I also picked raspberries. Of our three 14 ft. long rows, only one row is currently ripe. From that row I got two quarts. We're also managing to eat these fresh. Fresh raspberries and cream are just about my all-time favorite summer time treat. Mmmmm-mm!

The weather conspired against our strawberries this year. At least I think that's what did 'em in. The picking season was short, I never got what I would call big berries, many of them had a solid white side that had to be cut off and most were small and rather seedy. (Other than that, they were great. Hahaha!) I was feeling like a really baaaad strawberry grower until I heard that the pick-your-own strawberry farms up in Canada a short distance from us had exactly the same kind of season I did. Add strawberries to the growing list of weird gardening experiences this year.

We did eat our share of fresh strawberries, I gave some to friends and family, put eleven quarts of mashed berries in the freezer for smoothies and made seventeen 1/2 pint jars of strawberry jam. I also squirreled away a quart and a half of whole (specially selected) strawberries in the freezer that I'll use to make Strawberry Shortcake later on.

I had wanted to take a bunch of pictures out in the garden this weekend for a garden tour post (the good, the bad and the ugly it will be) but never got to it. Tomorrow looks to be a jam-packed full day but maybe I can still get that post ready. These days when I feel over-worked and droopy from the heat and the daily lists seem to get longer and longer, I wonder who thought of the lines to the old song, "Summer time, and the livin' is easy . . . "

Happy, Happy, Happy!

That broccoli I harvested yesterday . . . was THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BROCCOLI I have ever seen! And, yes, it was totally wormless. I soaked it in warm salt water for an hour and a half. No worms. I blanched it in preparation for freezing. No worms. Thank you, Sue! Thank you, Sue! (I am going to the Credit Union first thing Monday morning to see if I can get a loan to buy enough Agribon to cover our whole acreage.)

As gorgeous as the broccoli was I got only seven servings (a serving is enough to feed both of us one meal) from four heads. I saved one head in the refrigerator to use in a couple of new recipes I've been wanting to try.

I make an effort to preserve enough of each veggie I grow to last for (at least) one year. So even though I may get some side shoots from the broccoli plants yet, you can see I'm gonna fall short of enough broccoli to make it through to next year's harvest. (Understatement.)

But, hey, this year was definitely an experiment and one I'll continue fiddling with.

I'm going to plant some fall broccoli without the Agribon covering hoping the cycle of that nasty little white moth that lays eggs in the broccoli has run its course for the season. It will be very interesting to see if I can grow fall broccoli without cover, without worms. ('Course, I should point out I've never had success growing fall broccoli!)

As another aspect of the great Agribon experiment, I still have one bed covered with it. I used it on a bed of Brussels sprouts (also prone to being inedible because of little green you-know-whats). The Brussels sprouts won't be mature until later this fall. I had seven Brussels sprouts transplants I set out and also three broccoli plants I couldn't fit in the bed just harvested so put them in with the Brussels sprouts.

Now the curious thing is that none of the three broccoli plants in with the Brussels sprouts (under the Agribon) have started to form heads yet. The plants are big, the same size of those that I just harvested the mature heads from. Hmmmm . . . what's going on here?

Just another great garden mystery to be followed up on. But in the meantime, excuse me while I go gaze at my worm-free broccoli in the freezer.

Broccoli Harvest

In an effort to grow worm-free broccoli this year (for the first time EVER . . . I'm hoping), I covered my broccoli bed with a hoop configuration and Agribon the way sweet Sue does over at Sue's Garden Journal. In the last couple of days, by peeking through the Agribon, I could see that several nice-sized heads of broccoli were wanting to be harvested.

Above is the bed in the process of shedding its Agribon cover.

Ta-dah! The broccoli plants uncovered! They looked really very healthy.

Out of the nine plants put in the bed, this one matured way ahead of the rest. Because it's not a simple job to unfasten the Agribon (and then secure it back over the bed again), I chose to sacrifice this head and let it flower without harvesting it.

I harvested five heads today. Of the nine original plants, one keeled over and died (of an unidentified cause) shortly after we covered the bed. There is the one that matured too early and five I harvested today. That leaves two heads that I decided were too small to harvest today. I'll watch them carefully and probably harvest them in a few days.

The heads are good-sized. A little bigger than my hand span.

So did I manage to grow the broccoli worm-free? Dunno yet. I have the five heads soaking in warm salt water right now . . . which should drive the worms out if there are any there.

I'll give you an update later. Stand by . . . (Ooooh, the suspense!!)

Looking Forward To Being Chilly Tonight

Well, it probably won't feel exactly chilly, but when the forecast is calling for an overnight low of 57 degrees, that sure will feel a lot cooler than it has been at night for a long time.

I wonder if this means our hot, humid weather is on the way out? We can only hope.

Papa Pea and I went out early this morning to work on getting some of the old raised garden beds replaced before it got too hot. We were only going to do one, but that first one went really well and since we had all the tools out we did two more before finally calling it quits somewhere around three this afternoon. (Nuthin' like working right through the hottest part of the day for maximum sweat production!)

The humidity didn't seem so heavy today so that helped keep us going. But I just now took the scarf off my hair in preparation for taking a shower and lo and behold, my hair is still damp from sweating and I've been inside for four hours!

I picked the first handful of ripe blueberries from our bushes today and gave them to Papa Pea as reward for working so hard on the raised bed project. They're just starting to ripen up now.

I'll be getting our first harvest of raspberries tomorrow. If all goes well, we should get a lot of them this year.

These first that have ripened seem to be individually bigger than I remember them being in past years.

I haven't canned raspberries for a few years, but hubby has put in a special request that I preserve some that way this year because he loves to drink the juice that is left after we eat the raspberries.

I'd like to do a garden tour with pictures to post soon. After seeming to do nothing for weeks, some of the veggies are finally starting to put on some size. I even saw a zucchini blossom tonight. The first one!

We Have It So Easy

Today we grump and grumble about the "difficulties" we encounter making our way through life. Much of what we stress over has to do, I think, with the complexities of our modern lives which are caused to a large part by the extensive opportunities we have and the multitude of choices available to us.

A jog in my memory yesterday made me think back to an elderly couple hubby and I met some time in the second year of our marriage. This must have been about 1965 and at that time, the couple I'm remembering, Mr. and Mrs. Hawes, were both in their eighties.

Although life during the time when Mr. and Mrs. Hawes were trying to make a living and raise a family was so much more basic and simple, their life was much more difficult and challenging compared to our life today.

In the mid '60s we lived in a farming community in Illinois where a small weekly "buy, sell or swap" newspaper was published. Even then we were interested in obtaining the most natural food possible for ourselves so when we saw an ad for butter made with raw cow's milk, we decided to follow up on it. This led us to turning into the driveway of what looked to be a very neat, but very old family farm.

Mr. and Mrs. Hawes had lived on this same piece of property for over fifty years. They'd farmed the land and raised their children in the old two-story, bare bones farmhouse. When we met them, they had given up farming, leased out their land and no longer kept any animals except one Jersey cow which they still milked and separated the cream for making and selling butter.

We became steady customers of theirs and nearly each time we stopped to buy our butter, they asked us in for a little visit. With our encouragement, they reminisced about their life in days gone by.

They must have started farming in the early 1900s. We heard a story of the horse they had that was always difficult to get harnessed up. One time, Mr. Hawes had been having an especially hard time with the horse so sent his eight year-old son into the house to get his mother to come help with the uncooperative horse.

In the ensuing scuffle, the recalcitrant horse bit Mrs. Hawes on the side of her face. Needless to say, all thoughts of getting the horse harnessed up were forgotten as everyone went into the house to determine the extent of Mrs. Hawes' injuries. Luckily, they proved to be not very serious and soon everyone started to calm down.

As the mother and father were assuring their children that all was well, they saw their eight year-old son go stomping out the door with his BB gun. Mr. Hawes asked where he thought he was going. The little boy replied that he was going to go kill the horse that had hurt his mama!

Most family farms weren't profitable operations during those times, so Mr. Hawes was forced to take a job selling livestock feed to supplement their income. This necessitated him traveling long distances away from the farm. Of course, when he was gone it was up to Mrs. Hawes and the children to keep things running smoothly as best they could.

They told us of the time their old wood cook stove in the kitchen nearly burned the house down. The pipe from the stove went up through the ceiling and across the attic before venting into an old brick chimney. Fortunately, Mr. Hawes was home the day they had a chimney fire and the pipe in the attic broke and fell to the attic floor. The whole family working together was able to get the fire out before terrible damage was done. It's scary to think what would have happened if that old, wooden, tinderbox of a house had caught fire.

Mrs. Hawes talked of one year the insects were unbelievably bad in their crops and in her huge vegetable garden. She recalled standing for hours and hours at the kitchen sink alternating between crying over the paltry harvest and nearly becoming physically sick from the huge number of insects she tried to pick and wash out of the vegetables. Of course, these were times when they didn't have money to go to the grocery store to supplement the food for their table. These sad garden vegetables were all she would have to can and try to feed her family with during the coming year.

We listened as they talked of a particularly harsh winter when their area experienced one snowstorm after the other, always when Mr. Hawes was away, Mrs. Hawes remembered. During one of these blizzards two of the children who had had bad colds developed pneumonia. As we talked, Mrs. Hawes pointed to the spot in the living room where she had set up two cots near the parlor stove for the children to lie on so she could better tend to them. (There was no heat upstairs in the bedrooms.) She told of the night with a howling snowstorm that rattled every window in the house and the snow formed small drifts on the inside windowsills. Mr. Hawes was away, she was alone with the five children and the two with pneumonia were so sick that she thought she was going to lose both of them before morning. The telephone lines were down so she had no way of getting help. Although everyone survived that event, she said she'd never been able to enjoy a good snowfall since then.

Yep, we grumble about things such as the hot, humid weather, the lack of rainfall and the plague of insects dining in our gardens on a daily basis, but do we have a difficult life compared to how hard Mr. and Mrs. Hawes worked year after year to provide the basic necessities for themselves and their family?

I don't think so. We have it so easy.

Not What I Expected

A couple of months ago, sometime in May, hubby and I decided we both wanted to take off a few extra pounds that had mysteriously taken up residence on various unflattering parts of our bodies.

How to accomplish this? Simple. Cut out desserts and/or baked goods of any kind. And stop putting edible things in our mouths between meals. Being (sorta) intelligent and (sorta) strong willed, we felt we could do it.

Poor Papa Pea has much more of a sweet tooth than I do so it's been a little harder for him. Me? As long as I don't buy potato chips and have them in the house, I'm not tempted to rip into a bag in a weak moment some afternoon or after dinner with a cool glass of something liquid. I'm not saying I don't eat the baked goods I make, but I'm more salt and crunch; he's more sweet.

Is this plan of ours working in taking off the pounds? I think so, but don't really know about what weight loss we may have experienced because neither of us has gone near the scale that lives under our bed. But I can easily tell that my better half is looking leaner and my pants are definitely feeling roomier. I'm wearing shorts that I couldn't get into last summer. Wa-hoo! How great a feeling is that?

Something I've noticed (that is a little upsetting) and can hardly believe is how MUCH sugar, butter and flour I've NOT used since May. Were we ingesting ALL that sugar, butter and flour on a regular basis? Yup. Granted, a certain amount of what I baked was given away or eaten by someone other than the two of us, but all the same, we personally stuffed in plenty of it.

When we set up these restrictions, I expected to feel slightly deprived now and then and there are times when it seems like I NEED a small dessert to properly finish off a meal or when a cookie or two (or three or four . . . see how hard it is to be sensible?) would be just the pick-up I need a couple hours before dinner. But here's what I didn't expect to have surface.

I have found myself missing to a very large degree . . . the baking!

I've always found it both soothing and satisfying to sit down and go through my recipes to decide what to bake. Usually I have ingredients in the freezer or pantry I want to make use of. Or this time of year there are fresh berries and produce from the garden to be considered in my selection of what to bake.

For me the mixing and stirring and actual putting together, the creative process of baking is something I've missed. And then, of course, there is the WON-derful aroma of baked goods in the oven and lasting all the way through cooling on the counter.

Go ahead and laugh at me if you want, but I also feel less of a capable, efficient homemaker when I have no homemade goodie available to offer anyone who might stop in for a cuppa and a chat.

In hearing these sad lamentations (whiney complaints?), a couple of people have suggested I bake and give it away. First off, that would be cruel and unusual punishment for my husband. To watch me stand at the counter mixing up a sweet treat, smelling it while it baked and cooled and then stealing it out from under his very nose? That might be a little too much and send him right over the edge. Nope, can't chance that. It might satisfy my desire to go through the baking process but giving it away would still leave me with no luscious goodie smiling up at me from my kitchen counter.

All this rambling just goes to say that deeming baked goods a no-no in our house has worked well as far as losing pounds and/or inches, but has left a bit of an unsatisfactory empty spot in my Little Ms. Efficient/Happy Homemaker persona.

Can I handle it? Yeah, 'cause even though I do miss the baking for all the reasons mentioned, it's feeling pretty darn good to be losing that excess baggage that makes it uncomfortable to bend over and to not have to wear clothes that camouflage the extra flab making me feel self-conscious and unhealthy.

Will I give up baking forever? I doubt it. But can we limit our self-indulgence in sugar, butter and flour to the extent that it doesn't show up on our waistlines or impinge on our general healthiness? Time will tell. For now, I'm still feeling great about being able to fit into these summer shorts. With room to spare even!