Failure

Remember when I enthusiastically wrote about canning cream and pudding for our trip?  That didn't work out.  I'd noticed that they were separating, and then I moved the jars and found the lids unsealed.  Something had been growing in there.  When we poured them out they smelled BAD.  The whole house stunk. 

Canning failures are a big deal.  The stuff in those jars was probably deadly poisonous.  I should have looked it up before doing canning experiments.  Lesson learned. 

Our sweet corn was a complete bust.  We only planted one variety and the whole crop failed.  This was an experiment with the "three sisters:" corn, beans, and squash.  The beans and squash seem to be doing well, but they're all flopped on the ground and the corn didn't even make it three feet tall. 

The short plants set some corn cobs, they're not enough to bother with.

This is soil that really needed fertilizer and the corn showed it.  I've read about the problem of monoculture at the large industrial scale (only growing one variety), and here we've had an example on the small scale.  It will be a year without sweet corn.

Like all failures, these are better thought of as God's teaching moments.  Our job is to learn.

Uh oh, I Have To Go

A friend of mine asked about my blog yesterday.  I admitted that I'm not doing much.  With the harvest coming on, I get photos taken, the post half written, and then get pulled away and never get back to it.

This week it's peaches!  Our peach tree is still young and only produced a few fruits.  We picked up seven boxes of peaches from the local fruit stand.

...uh oh, I have to go milk...

Milking is a two person affair in our house.  My husband does one side and I do the other in the morning.  In the evening, he does one side and one of our teenagers does the other. 

Speaking of milking, Christina is officially drying off.  After switching her to grass hay, which is lower quality so she produces less milk, yesterday we switched to one milking a day.  Christina gets these last two months of pregnancy to herself and we have plenty of milk in the freezer, but it's a little strange to watch the milk go down and down.  After nine months of 4.5 gallons a day, yesterday she gave 2.4 gallons and today 2.1 gallons.  She's going down, just like she should.

But back to peaches!  For three days I cut up peaches in the morning and put them in the freezer on big sheets.  The next day they got broken up and put into gallon freezer bags.  These will be for fruit smoothies and pies.

Last night a got a batch going in the dehydrator.

Today we are canning.  Canned peaches are my daughters' favorite.  Canning fruit is so easy that we'll probably be able to get four boxes of fruit done by lunch time.

The chickens have gotten pretty comfortable out on the pasture.  The first day beefy chased them back but now the cows seem comfortable too.  My husband was working out in the pasture and got this shot of nap time in the shed.

...uh oh, I have to go pick green beans...

Long Days of Self-Sufficient Living

Those strawberries have been sitting in the frig for three days and many were pretty ripe to begin with.  We've put four of the flats in the freezer, tucked away in six gallon freezer bags ready for fruit smoothies, but the rest had to be dealt with.  The girls started by pulling off the stems.  They set up work areas at the table and worked upwards of two hours.  I kept strawberries rotating through the wash water and back to my smashing-station before they went into the jelly pot.

After heating the mashed strawberries up, I added pectin, kept heating to boiling, and then added sugar.  When the whole thing was boiling again, I ladled the jam into jars. Fifteen minutes in the boiling water canner and they were done.

While we were working indoors, my husband was working with that little Bobcat to clean up the manure.  This is the second full day he's put in.  It has been a big bigger mess than we realized.

After four or five hours on my feet, going hard, we have 24 jars of strawberry jam to show for our efforts.  Tomorrow when they are thoroughly cool, they'll go into the cupboard.

When it was finished, I immediately started a cheese.  Thankfully, cheese begins with warming up and letting it set for an hour.  But then it was over and time to get up and stir cheese.  

By 6pm I was exhausted and my knees ached, but walking out to check on my husband, I noticed the broccoli was starting to bloom.  Ack!  So I harvested everything and tonight I'll have to blanch and freeze all this.  Oh, I'm so tired already.

My favorite book on self-sufficient living says that this living can make for very long days.  Boy, is she right!

Making Applesauce

We had seven bushels of apples in the garage needing attention.  We got through about two-and-a-half of them yesterday making applesauce.  It was a long day — from 9am to 7:30pm with no break.  Even in my working life, I canned applesauce because the flavor is so much better, but it is a lot of work.

We have lots of Cameo apples because that's what they had at the U-Pick place, but they are bland.  We added McIntosh for flavor.

Everybody pitched in — washing apples and running the apple-peeler-corer and food mill.  We sliced up enough apples to fill the four-gallon stock pot and cooked the apples down.  It took about 30 minutes to bring them up to a boil and another 30 to cook down, stirring every two or three minutes. 

After running the cooked apples through the food mill, we filled quart jars with sauce.  The jars boiled in the water-both canner for 25 minutes.  Each batch made seven quarts.  The left-over pulp went into freezer containers for applesauce cake.

After four batches, at about 4:30pm, we had 28 quarts of applesauce and 9 containers of apple pulp.

As she was spinning the handle, one of the twins asked me how people made applesauce before food mills. I had no idea, but I suggested that back then they didn't can in jars either, so everything was different. It got me to thinking about the lives of women who had to do these hug jobs by themselves over a wood stove. I had two or three people helping all day and it was still overwhelming.  It's old fashioned and quaint to us, but I'm so grateful for food mills.

Still able to stand, we made one more batch for apple butter.  After running it through the food mill, I added cinnamon, cloves and allspice and cooked it down for another two hours, stirring every two minutes. The smell of spices and apples in the house was a preview of the holidays.  Tomorrow we'll have some on toast.

Before breaking things down and cleaning up, the twins offered to make pie crust if we'd do some more for apple pie.  It was an easy offer to accept.  At the end of the day with aching legs, back, and arms, two beautiful pies came out of the oven.  One of the twins jumped up to do the serving and I had a piece of pie presented to me on the prettiest place she could find.

These were apples from our area, but not grown on our land.  Next year will be different.  We planted fruit trees that have grown a lot already.  Each of the four apple trees are expected to produce 3-5 bushels when they mature in the next year or two.  Whereas now we are dealing with seven bushels, then we'll have a dozen or more.  I'll put more in the root cellar for fresh eating in the winter.  We'll build a bigger dehydrator and dry more.  I guess we'll have more apple canning days.

But this morning, as jars cool on the counter and containers sit in the freezer, we're not working on apples.   We ate my favorite breakfast, a recipe from my favorite cookbook that requires applesauce — Baked Oatmeal from Simply in Season.  The kids were quiet while it quickly disappeared.  Today I will do Pilates to loosen up my back, attempt some power-rest, and schedule the next canning day.  There are over four bushels out there still.

Tomatoes

We noticed a few tomatoes turning red so we ran out to get them before the irrigation comes tomorrow.  Pretty soon the five-gallon harvest bucket was full and we were looking for another bucket.  This is becoming routine — I think I'm going to pick a little and find a whole lot.

I already had a bunch of tomatoes in the freezer, so I couldn't just throw these in the freezer and deal with them later. While my husband and daughter made pizza for dinner, I blanched and skinned tomatoes as fast as I could.  Tomato skins just slide off if they've been in a boiling water for a few seconds.  (My nine-year-old took this gorgeous photo of tomatoes coming out of the boiling water, skins pulled back)

In the past I avoiding making tomato sauce because it had to boil for so long to get rid of the water.  I read that if tomatoes are hung overnight, much of the water will come out.  It's worth trying.  We set up a hanging contraption in the pantry with a milk bucket to catch the drippings.  There's already an inch of clear liquid in the bottom.  Tonight we have two of these large bags hanging.

Just like the peppers, I started a bunch of tomatoes plants last spring, but lost track of which kinds they were.  In June I just threw plants in the ground.  In the middle of the big tomatoes we found arms of cherry tomato vines heavy with fruit.  There's enough for several good snacks.