More Posts Coming Soon

So sorry for the slacking in backyard posts. My mother fell down stairs in mid-August and fractured her pelvis; thus, I've been a tad busy since that time.  Retirement is scheduled for October 28 and I'm (very) hopeful to fire up this blog full-time immediately after that to keep my friends and family tuned in to what's happening in the backyard and around and about.  By the way, my mom is in my backyard - literally!  She's a stone's throw down over the hill in a beautiful old farmhouse, so spending time in the backyard is twofold.  I truly love having my parents so close as they age.  It's a blessing - truly. 

Summertime Whitegrass Love

Our favorite winter destination, Whitegrass in West Virginia, cooks up some fabulous dishes and puts many of those delectable recipes into two cookbooks. Both have prominent, permanent spots in my kitchen.  Today, I share "Betsy's Tomato Salad" from the first cookbook, "Whitegrass Cafe, Cross Country Cooking."  This salad is scrumptous with any tomato, onions, herbs or vinegar.  But make it with heirloom Black Krim tomatoes, sweet spanish onions, homegrown herbs, and purple basil vinegar and it's through-the-roof incredibly good.  Enjoy!

3-4 ripe summer tomatoes, sliced (I used Black Krim)
1 thin sliced sweet onion ( my choice is sweet Spanish)
1/4 tsp. dried basil (purple ruffles - dried last winter)
1/4 tsp dried oregano (Greek oregano - dried last winter)
1/4 tsp. dried dill (dried last winter)
1/4 tsp. dried chives (I used fresh for this - that's all I had)
1/2 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. red wine vinegar or lemon juice (purple basil vinegar, made last year)
2 Tbs. Olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/8 tsp. black pepper

Start a layer of tomatoes in a shallow glass pan.  Then add a sprinkle of seasonings (and sugar) over the top.  Make a marinade by mixing vinegar, olive oil, garlic and pepper.  Sprinkle a little marinade over the tomatoes.  Then add a laery of onion.  Continue the layering process, cover and chill for 2 hours before serving.  The juices and marinade create the most wonderful flavor.  Makes 4-6 servings. 

A summertime delight from our friend, Betsy Reed, Owner of Canaan Realty. 

Dancing Onions

Painting by Pamela Swainson

Each spring  for more than 20 years, a portion of Chili’s backyard is reserved solely for onions – lots of onions.   I can’t recall ever planting less than 400 plants or onion sets in all those years. To keep the rotation going from year to year, I’d get creative and move the onion patch to interesting  locations.  They would circle the birdbath, line walkways, and sometimes would be in traditional tidy rows in the garden.     My entire  family eats onions with everything.    They are fried, baked, boiled and sauteed in big pieces, little pieces, and in perfect rings.   They are thrown in with soups, stews, meats, eggs, and eaten on sandwiches.  Our breath would stink, the house would wreak, and the cellar sometimes has a drip or two of rotting onion if we aren’t careful.  But hey, it’s all part of the onion love process we can’t live without.    This year, was the first time in 20 years, I think we’ve finally perfected the onion harvest, although I can’t take credit for it.  Mom nature cooked up the perfect recipe to grow, harvest, and preserve the optimum onion bounty.    The spring started damp and cool – baby onion heaven.  The rains went well into June and early July, then suddenly stopped – just about the time the onions were getting ready to finish their  growing and were getting a little obese.  As most crops were screaming for water, the onions were basking in the sun, shriveling and drying up with delight, letting me know exactly when they were ready for a little shade by hanging their weary, dried up necks.   That’s when I helped them out of the ground and settled them in under the shade canopy for some air drying for another two-three weeks.  Continuing lack of moisture gave the onions a chance to party a little more, and party they did.   They lost their skin, hair, and feet in the process.    Last night, I started to put about half of them to sleep in the cool 60ish degree cellar.  So far, only three – THREE – were rotted and thrown to the bugs.  I emphasize three because most years from ¼ to ½ of the harvest rots.    I found choice of variety, choice of sets vs. plants, and weather play a huge factor in perfecting the harvest and reducing the numbers of rots.  I found timing the harvesting and watching for dried necks before pulling are critical to preventing rotting necks as a result of pulling too soon and not allowing them to dry completely.  I found plants to be better than sets for storage.  And I found Yellow Sweet Spanish and Red Zeppelin onions to be the absolute best keepers and flavor enhancers.  And Dixondale Farms is my onion plant grower of choice.  Each year, I get my order exactly when I want it and there’s usually a few extra plants with each order.   And mom nature is the absolute best when she’s hot and sunny come onion harvest time.  This year was an  exceptional year and the onions are dancing with delight.  Thanks mom! 

3.5 years Later....

My very first post on this blog in January of 2008 talked about retiring and I mentioned not having time to garden with exercising so much and commuting two hours a day, "So I buy them (vegetables) for now, and dream of the day I retire and get back into it full time again. Its the top of my priority list of things to do after retirement."

And here it is... past that glorious day I was to retire.  BUT, I'm very proud to say the goal has not changed and the garden continues to be top priority after retirement -  probably even more so than when first written.  And when is the official day?  Very soon my friends, soon.  When confirmed, you know I'll be blogging about it!

Feeding the Caterpillars

This beauty will eventually become the beautiful Black Swallowtail butterfly.  Every year, I grow bunches of dill, fennel, carrots and parsley and they are all members of the Umbellifarae (parsley) family.  I grow them mainly to attract the tachinid flies which keeps the great tomato horn worms under control, but a bonus are these beautiful caterpillars and butterflies.  Sometimes its ok to let the caterpillars eat the plants.  In this case,  eat and enjoy!

The Heat of the Summer

Central Pennsylvania is under a heat wave the past two weeks and watering the gardens has become a nightly event.   Little did I realize how much time mother nature saves me when she throws some drops our way -- at least an hour a night.  My decision to NOT train for an October bike race was a wise decision and perfectly timed.  The training was to start last week - just about the time the heat wave came and I started watering in the evenings.  We are smack dab in the middle of the summer right now and the harvesting and storing has begun.  Below is a run down of what's happening in the backyard on a routine basis right now.  The harvesting, preparing, and storing will continue until mid or the end of October.  Lots of work is ahead.

• Onions! I'm pulling them as the tops lay over and have dried for a day or two, then setting them on a drying screen under a covered area to cure (dry some more)  for a couple weeks. As more are pulled, others that are "finished" are moved to storage in our 60 degree cellar.   I'll use the last of them for the filling for Christmas dinner.  Those with thick necks that may rot are cut up, cooked slightly, then froze.  When the dry are gone, we dig into the freezer.  A perfect year of stored onions.
• Spinach!  I got lucky this year and all the seeds planted sprouted.  What I can't eat fresh, I'm cutting, washing, chopping, and cooking just until wilted, then freezing in 10 oz sizes.  Most recipes call for 10 oz of frozen, chopped spinach.  I'll be happy to find the spinach in the freezer sometime in January.
• Chard! Eating fresh with eggs and also mixing in salads.  I may freeze some of this in single servings to cook with eggs this winter.
• Tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, and zucchini - they are all starting to ripen.  I made zucchini patties and have been using the other goodies in salads. 
• Sweet Potatoes!  Yup - I already have some and I'm very, very excited to be eating them already.  I have 50 plants in the ground that will produce at least 4 or 5 potatoes per plant.  I'm gonna have a LOT of sweet potatoes to eat.
• Red Potatoes!  Yup, they are ready too.  Not too many of those, so I'm saving for in recipes and focusing on the sweet potatoes.
• Butternut Squash - not ready yet, but there are at least 3 dozen squash growing on the vines.  The rabbits (or ground hogs??) were munching on the newly sprouted seeds in the spring, so I planted more seeds in a separate garden and low and behold they ALL kept growing.  We're going to have a bumper crop of squash along with the sweet potatoes.  We'll be orange this winter!
• Volunteers - I have two heirloom tomatoes that seeded themselves and came up this year.  "Grandma Cantrell's Red tomato" is ripening beautifully.  A handful of sunflowers also came up on their own.  Oh, and an heirloom muskmelon (forgot the name)  is gonna produce two or three melons. 
• Parsley - I grow this for my dear old mom.  She dried 6 jars already.  I'll dry about two.  
• Basil - I'll dry some of this for winter meals.
• Fall and Winter seeds:  Planted and being watered every night.  We'll have carrots, red beets, radishes, and spinach.  The beets and radishes have already sprouted and in this heat need daily attention (water).  I'll have to watch them carefully.

Other than that, not much going on.

Can You Really "Live Off the Land?"

A 30-something, former city-boy asked my parents that question 30 years ago while he was touring their farm for the possibility of renting it. My parents -- both country folk -- snickered under their breath and said, "sure." To an individual that never experienced farming or a garden, it IS a question to be asked. But to a native country, daughter and granddaughter of generations of farming and gardening, it's not even something to think about -- it's just done. Most of us have gotten spoiled in the past 40 or 50 years. Conveniences galore: fast food, pre-packaged food, humongous servings at a restaurant, and super-sweet tasting, luscious ice-cream stands. Why would we go to all the hard work to live off the land? Why raise chickens when you can get eggs for $1.50/dozen and the whole bird for $5 bucks at your local Walmart. Well, our grandparents did it because they had no choice. Money was hard to come by, there simply wasn't plastic bags of already-frozen ready-to-eat meals and there wasn't a grocery store on every corner not to mention the choices were slim-pickens in those stores. But many people today are going back to the land or never left it like the Amish. "Homesteading" is growing in leaps and bounds while others choose to get off the grid and grow their own food for environmental reasons. My husband and I may soon join these ranks. I was planning to disband this blog due to lack of time to update, but now that the possibility is very real that I may become a full-time homesteader in 4 months, (well, my idea of homesteading focuses on the food production, not-so-much the extreme life changes like no refrigerator or using a composting toilet), I'm going to continue posting. Why might we be homesteaders? Early retirement - forced for hubby (awaiting final word coming on Thursday) - by choice for me. Stay tuned and watch for lots of posts on living off the land and early retirement.

Glad to Be Back in the Garden

Last fall, the thought was I wouldn't have a garden this year with the anticipated training that would consume my time to prepare for the now finished 7-day stage mountain bike race. But alas, you can't keep an organic gardener down - you need a little pleasure mixed in with all that pain so I stuck some seeds and plants in the beds in between rides this spring. My idea of "some" seeds and plants is 400+ onions, 50 sweet potatoes, 13 seed potatoes, 60 broccoli plants for the hog (he ate all of them!) swiss chard, kale (the hog went after this after the broccoli was pulled), butternut squash, zucchini, spinach, lettuce, black krim and russian prince black heirloom tomatoes, roma tomato, early girl tomato, fox heirloom cherry tomato, nardello pepper, bell peppers, cantelope, radiccho and cannelli beans. Now mid-June and home two weeks from the Epic, the spring planting is complete and I expect a full harvest this fall. There was no slacking due to a little bike race! Yesterday and today was spent weeding, mulching, plant-feeding, and planting the final seeds for the summer. I managed to snap a couple shots while doing so.

Milkweed...one of my favorite plants in the garden. Yes - in the garden. It attracts a plethora of beneficial insects and of course the monarch caterpillar (only food it will eat). And did you ever smell a milkweed flower? Heavenly.

And these are the potatoes -- sweet and red.

Love Thy Tomato

Two years ago, I had the pleasure of trying a variety pack of heirloom tomato seeds. The results were these incredibly sweet, unusual tomatoes that made me realize there's more that meets the tomato-lover's eye and I gave a review of those luscious edibles I grew that year. See it here. Yesterday, I receive a post in Facebook about a new book out called Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. Numerous reviews are already out there that talk about this book and modern industrial agriculture creating a monster that doesn't compare to a "real" tomato. Time gives a good review with an excerpt from the book on modern "slavery" in the tomato fields of Florida. USA Today journalist, Janice Lloyd, interviews the author, Barry Estabrook, who shares his idea of a quality tomato (hint: Brandywine). From that interview the author states: "I visited winter tomato fields in Florida where tomatoes are picked green and sent to warehouses and gassed with ethylene until they acquire the rosy skin tone of a ripe tomato. I also talked to many experts about how flavor has been bred out of them over the years so they can ship easily, maintain a perfect appearance and have a long shelf life." I'll share my own take on the book once received and read (I'm a little old fashioned and just like I enjoy an old-fashioned heirloom tomato, I like a hardcover book with pages to turn. Keep your modern electronics, please!) In the meantime, please read my review of the heirloom tomatoes and head out to your local nursery and buy a couple. The nurseries are good at marking heirlooms appropriately so you can't miss them. There's still time to plant a few and you'll never buy a grocery store tomato again.

And to Think I Wasn't Going to Have A Garden This Year

The garden was going to wait this year while I train for a 7-day stage mountain bike race, but I couldn't bare the thought of not having certain vegetables I grew to depend on each season. This year more than ever, with the high prices of produce, several plants just had to be planted. You saw the 453-onion patch in an earlier post. Today, I planted 72 broccoli plants, mounded up the sweet potato rows for 50 slips coming in a couple weeks, and dug the potato trench for the Red Norland seed potato Donna's neighbors Andre and Diane so kindly shared. Donna and I will split them in the fall. The spinach is coming up and the kale over-wintered and is coming back. I love spring... I wish I was retired!