Back to Plants, Thank God!

We are back to plant matter, thank God!  Butcher day was hard on all of us. 

We've had several hard frosts and it's time for the winter squash to come in.  The first step is to let them dry well.  We filled two tables.  Now they'll sit in the sun for several days.

This year our winter squash harvest was probably half of last year's.  I might have planted less, but I also think the plants are really feeling the lack of fertilizer.  Skipping a year of adding manure was a *bad* idea.

Those tomatoes we picked over two weeks ago are ripening up nicely.  Tonight we get to enjoy a whole bowl of "fresh" tomatoes.  If we had put them in the root cellar, they'd ripen even slower and then we could have had "fresh" tomatoes at Christmas.  Maybe next year.

I'm watching this class on food and one of the topics was what makes a diet nutritious.  Many studies disagree, but all seems to concur that vegetables are good.  In an effort to increase our vegetable intact, we started eating dinner in courses.  First we eat veggies, fresh and cooked, and then we eat everything else.  So far it's working.

It's November and we are still working hard on the garden.  There are more things to harvest and seeds to collect and beds to protect, but it's cold and I just as soon sit in a comfy chair under a blanket.  Once I get out there, I enjoy myself, but I sure do procrastinate getting out there. 

First Frost

The first frost descended upon us.  At 6pm I saw the forecast for freezing temperatures.  With only an hour of daylight left, we all went out to the garden and started picking.  We picked every pepper and cucumber and then got as many tomatoes as we could before it got too dark.

This morning we had buckets all over the garage. We dropped everything to pay attention to these vegetables.  I've learned that sitting in buckets in the garage does nothing to improve vegetables. 

The tomatoes were separated into ripe, almost ripe, and green.  They will continue to ripen in the house.  The ripe cherry tomatoes went to the table. Next week those orange ones will probably be ready, and maybe another week for the green ones. 

The canning tomatoes were also separated.  The ripe ones went into the blender and crock pot, just filling it.  After a full day of reducing, they'll be canned.  The rest will go when they are ready.

Even the peppers got separated.  The red ones will go into the dehydrator while we wait for the green ones to finish ripening.

In the midst of it all, we kept the apples going.  A friend lent us her food strainer.  She said it handles peels so we wanted to try it.  We sliced the apples up with a corer/wedger and filled the stock pot. I think it only took 15 minutes to wash, shove the thing down, and throw the apples into the pot.  After almost two hours of stewing, we ran them through this food mill.  Out one side came beautiful applesauce and pulp came out the other side.  My daughters took turns cranking the handle and I was shocked when it was done in less than 10 minutes.  Wow!

With the frost, we are full into harvest, but we have also started back to homeschooling.  God's abundance is mighty.  We laborers will try to keep up.

And Then There Were Fewer

This morning we headed to the front garden. It was way overgrown with weeds.  In two hours, with all of us working, we got the whole thing done.  It's amazing!  I wish we'd taken a before picture to show you, but here is an after picture.  We found all kinds of good stuff growing down underneath the big weeds.

Instead of tomato cages, this year we're trying to trellis the tomatoes.  I hate the way the cages flop over by the end of summer, and we have a lot of tomato plants.  We put up livestock fence down the row and now I'll try to train the plants up it. 

I think I just need to weave them in and out as they grow.  I added a few twist ties, just to get them over next to the trellis.

We have gotten so much weeding done this week, but it is taking its tole.  Bending over every morning and pulling hard for several hours has made my back stiff and my arms weak.  We have had fits and starts in weeding — getting lots done but then ignoring it so long they come back strong.  I think it's time to try a new approach.

Harvest

With the last nice days of the season, we are bringing in the final harvest. As I look over the winter squash, like these acorn squash, I am amazed how many varieties we planted.  Last spring when I was looking at squash in the seed catalog, I must have been thinking preettttyyyyy and just ordered them all.  I think we have five or six varieties.

We got two varieties picked and stacked up to dry.  These are called Uncle David's Dakota Dessert.  I sure hope they live up to their name.  We pretty much only eat squash in custard and pie.  Squash custard is easy to make and we eat it for breakfast in the winter — squash, eggs, milk and not any more sugar than the kids would dump on their oatmeal.

We grew flour corn for the first time.  The book said to wait until the stalks dry out or freeze.  This variety is a native of the southwest and is supposed to make a good corn flour.  I think we'll need to let it dry for quite a while still.  If we want to make maza we need go through a hominy step and I haven't decided if we'll go to the effort.  Our two sweet corn varieties had some left overs so we let them dry for grain too.  We should be able to make cornmeal out of that.


After pulling the ears off, we cut the stalks off at the ground, gathered them up, and then stalked them up in the corners of the cow shed.  Corn stalks are decent food for cows.  People who are better at this than me will grind them up and make silage, which sounds like it goes through a fermentation process.  We're just feeding them straight to Christina and beefy. I read somewhere that corn stalks don't have much nutrition for cows, but it's fine in moderation.  So we've been giving them a few stalks a day.  It sure it fun to see them chomping away. 

We dug the last of the potatoes and got them put away in the root cellar.  In the end we probably only got a bushel or two.  I don't think they were too happy with where they were planted because most of the plants didn't produce that much, but then we would find one with lots of good sized potatoes.  My With fresh potatoes, my daughters have been making oven french fries most every day.

At the end of the day, we had a lot to show for our efforts.  We finished harvesting the dry beans.  With maybe only half of the corn done, we had three buckets.  It says that they store better in the husk, so we left them on.  In these last days of the season, the tomatoes are still ripening and we found lots.

Our first frost is forecast for next week.  We've had a few cold nights and some plants have gotten nipped, but the hard frost that knocks vines down hasn't happened yet.  Lots of things don't actually have to come in before the frost, but it still feels like a deadline.

Part of my rush is trying to beat the cold weather.  If it's hard to deal with 70F days, then how will I do with 55F days?  But I know that it'll be good for me to get out in the cooler air and work.  It will help reset my internal temperature gauge and make the cold easier to live with all winter.  I wish I looked forward to things that are good for me.

Urban Homesteading

Overnight those tomatoes shed a lot of water.  One bucket had about five inches of yellow-tinged water but the other had only about a quarter of that.  The first one had tomatoes that had been frozen and the other had tomatoes that we had freshly picked.  Freezing must break down the tissues so they shed water better.  Mental note — freeze tomatoes before hanging.

After dumping the tomatoes in my big stock pot, we brought it up to a boil.  My stock pot is thinner than it should be and food scorches easily.  To save myself stirring constantly, I put the pot in a water bath using my big canner.  It worked.  Stirring every 10-15 minutes was sufficient.  After the tomatoes cooked down, I pulled about half out and ran it through a food mill, getting rid of lots of seeds and some hard spots.

In the end, even with draining all that fluid, the sauce simmered for nine hours to reduce by half, giving us seven quarts of rich, beautiful sauce, just right for spaghetti or pizza.  But my conscience is nagged by running our electric stove so long.

We emptied out the big onion patch.  With four of us pulling, it went pretty fast.  The books say to dry them in the sun for a week or two before putting them in long term storage, so we dumped them out on the patio table.  It looks pretty impressive to me.  The book also says that the ones that still have green tops won't keep well, so we'll separate those out and use them first.

The days are shortening and shade has encroached on the patio from the big walnut trees in the south.  The change in the light takes me back to this time last year.  I wasn't nearly as busy, but I dreamed of this work.  We had spent the summer reclaiming the pasture and garden from the weeds and by this time we had worked up to bare dirt.  Although living in town, we were doing the work of homesteading.  One short year later, God is feeding us abundantly with a heavy garden, milk, and meat and educating us in things that were common knowledge a century ago.

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.

The Garden is a Mess

For the first time in a while, I stepped off the path, over to the tomatoes, and discovered a jungle mess that had been out of sight.  The furrows we worked on so hard last spring have worn down or are completely hidden by the overgrowth.  We were so good at weeding until it got hot.  Those little weeds have grown into huge spindly monsters.  I pulled the ones that came out easily, but then I just gave up.  I'll till them in later.

How much it is like my life.  Just a mess.  My brokenness overgrown and big.  Some sins easy to pull out, but others so entrenched that I just leave them alone.  Many gain strength simply from lack of attention.

As I walked through looking for tomatoes, I couldn't even tell where the rows were.  Those pitiful little tomato plants I put out last June have spilled out everywhere.  Some never got a cage around them and have sprawled out five or six feet.  Others got cages, but grew out more than up.  Others grew up and knocked their cage over.

Looking at that knocked over cage was like taking an honest look at my life.  My own need for control overgrowing and knocking over others with unrelenting pressure.  My self-centeredness searching for a place of importance, but with no support, flopping over in a heap on the ground.

Christina came to say hi while I was walking around.  I don't see her much any more.  I'm too lazy to go say "hi" just for fun, and with no milking to be done there isn't much reason to go out there.  I admit that fear is part of my problem.  She is a large animal and can be pushy.  I don't know how to respond to that, so I stay away.  But she hasn't forgotten me.  She gently walked over, sniffed me, and watched my excursion.  I get lazy and scared of God too.

Some weeds are going to seed.  I can hear my father-in-law, dead almost eight years now, saying, "better get those pulled."  But there are so many of them.  The ground is hard.  The roots are stubborn.  So I walk away, let them spread their seed, providing certainty that they will be back next year.

Weeds discourage me, the same as sin does.  I walk through these uninvited plants and feel overwhelmed.  I wonder if this is how God feels walking through my life, discouraged at the sins grown large from lack of attention and lack of will.

But as I walk I notice other things too.  The broccoli plant I hadn't gotten around to pulling had a new crop of blooms on the back side, down under the dominant topgrowth.  They are perfect flowerettes, dark and dense, better looking than anything we got last spring.  Could there be parts of me flowering on the back side, places where God has been quietly growing something better than I've ever seen?

The cantaloupe plant is dying back, and plump orange cantaloupes are standing up out of the declining vines.  They sweeten as the plant recedes.  I hear an echo of the cross, a dying body, that left such sweet fruit for all humanity.  Are there parts of my life that are like the dying vines, leaving sweet fruit behind?

I looked under a large squash canopy and found perfect fruits in their final preparation for winter.  I didn't even know they were there.  There were lots of them, round, beautiful, and hardening for a long cold wait until they warm and nourish our family.  I have ignored these plants just like I ignored the weeds, but they have produced.

The weeds have grown, but the garden has grown stronger.  The weeds may be big, but God didn't let that stop abundant growth.  In fact, as I look back over the garden, most of it looks as if the weeds didn't make any different at all.  It just looks neater to me without weeds. But God doesn't need the weeds to stay away to make amazing things happen.  My attention or lack of attention doesn't seem to make a big difference either because with God there is new life.  With God there is fruit.  With God there is a harvest.  My job is only to look for it.