Canning days are here again

Bonus points if you can read that title and not automatically think of this song.

I've been curled up with the Ball Blue Book these past few summer nights.  Exciting reading, I know, but there are some great things happening right now that we want to enjoy come winter.  Plus, of course, scoring blue ribbons at the local fair.

My canning buddy with his busy bee.

For the first time I'm putting up a flavored vinegar.  This one is mint and lemon in white wine vinegar. We really like salads and thanks to Jamie Oliver we most often make our own dressings.  This seems like it would be good over sturdy greens in winter. 

Our wild blackberries are going crazy this year.  There are so many of them out there and not nearly enough time to pick them all.  Hopefully I'll can some jam and freeze a quart more for the winter.  The flavor of the berries varies from patch to patch: the ones behind the chicken run are very tart and the ones by the shed super sweet.  No idea why.  Soil, maybe? Chicken poo? Who knows.

Last year I canned blueberry syrup for our pancakes and it was a huge hit.  This year I did another batch of blueberry and also some blackberry syrup.  Here the cooked berries are draining overnight.  The blueberries made a purple juice while the blackberries are more of a maroon. We weren't thinking of this use for the brackets when we went with open shelving (um, more like they were cheap) but dang, look at that! Perfect!

The Ball Book had a recipe for blueberry syrup and I just substituted blackberries with the second batch.  Substituting anything while canning is pretty frowned upon for food safety reasons but I can't imagine the acidity levels are that different.  Cutting the Ball Book recipe in half results in 4 jelly jars of syrup for each batch.  The blackberry syrup is very good - nor overly sweet at all and still managed to keep its fruit flavor.  Besides pancakes I'd like to put these over coffee cakes this winter and maybe scones.

We have a busy weekend ahead of us but here's hoping to get some more jars put up next week: at least some jars of garlic and some mixed berry jam.

A week in pictures & garlic harvest

A beautiful blue jay feather. This is the second one we've found this week.

Relaxing in the hammock with the baby.

A evening with the family at the lake.

A mostly vegetarian meal from the garden.  We're getting zucchini and potatoes now and it's really exciting.  You know it's a good dinner when a toddler nabs a bite while you're taking a picture.  

A grey sky after some much needed rain.  We got an entire night of storms and the rain barrel system on the chicken coop hit it out of the ballpark.  We had let it go empty before the storm to see how it would work and it was totally full the next day.  And the coop has a tiny roof! Maybe 9 x 5 feet? Now that I see how well it's working it makes me regret not taking advantage of this resource earlier.

I was able to find transplants on clearance this week, a flat for $10.  Some got planted in the garden. Not shown: cucumber, pepper, tomato and herb transplants.

The rest my helper and I planted up in pots on the porch.

Some sweet zinnias in the garden.  I pulled the rest of the fava plants and would like to get a second round of bush beans planted tomorrow along with the cucumbers.

Cannas and winter squash.  My husband is still mowing in between the rows for me.  You can see how much Japanese Beetle damage we're getting - the edges of the canna leaves are brown and tattered.

I love these tiger lilies.

The sunflowers are beautiful too.  In this picture he's bothering Bee, who is in one of her favorite napping spots.

The quail pen is being totally overtaken by winter squash.  This should look really fun in another month.

The wild blackberries are coming on.  I've put about a quart in the freezer and would like to can some blackberry pancake syrup this week. Maybe blueberry syrup too if there's time to pick berries at my parent's house.  That was a really nice treat for us last winter.

I can't seem to find on the blog when I planted garlic last fall.  Anyway, it's ready to be pulled and cured so I did that this evening.

 

Here's what I ended up with.  File this under "free food" since it was planted entirely with the cloves that were leftover after I put up last year's harvest by canning the garlic.

None of them are very big, but it's a ton of garlic.  Enough to can a couple of pints for the house, give away and re-plant this fall.  I wonder how long we can continue re-planting from the same original batch? Free garlic every year? Count us in.  Most of the stuff in the stores is imported from China.  No thanks.

Well, that's it.  It's been a wonderful week.

Settling into our new normal

It finally feels like things are getting back to normal around here.  A busy, messy, wonderful whirlwind of life that's our new every day.  The baby is doing wonderfully.  Maybe it's because we've done this once before but it seems like he's so easy to take care of.  It feels like we're starting to find our footing again.  

There's been so much going on over the last week.  

First, a HUGE thank you to Marlene over at Poppy Patchwork!  

This sweet package of gifts came the day before we went to the hospital, sent all the way from England. I was so excited and touched to receive it in the mail.  Look at the cute fabric for the little bag! And the tea towel! She even included a pattern and an example of French seaming for me - it makes me want to get my sewing machine out again.  Marlene: THANK YOU!  I have a little surprise to send back your way and I'm going to stop over and leave a note in the comments - I'm not sure about the return address on the package and want to check it with you.

When you visit Marlene's blog be sure to notice that she and I have matching cats.  Bee has a twin.  How funny is that?  In Bee news: the oddest thing happened while we were at the hospital - Bee lost her voice.  I have no idea what happened (when you Google this it could be anything from a virus to rabies, yay) but she sounds like she smokes about three packs a day.  She has lost her "meow" or, as the little man says "Bee lost her me-mowl. Is lost out in the grass." which is so funny I make him tell this to everyone.  We talk about how she looks for her "me-mowl" when she goes outside in the morning.  So far it's still missing.

Well, what else is new? The little man is thrilled to be a big brother but it's a huge adjustment and we're trying to spend as much one on one time with him as possible.  Of course, as a mom, it never feels like I'm doing enough.  There's been lots of "stirring it up" in the kitchen.

He wanted pancakes for dinner.  With sprinkles.  It was like eating sugar topped with more sugar but who cares, once in a while won't hurt anyone.

I did sneak some blueberries into the batch just on principal. 

Sigh.  It's totally worth the mess. Over the last couple of days we've made pancakes, play dough,  apple cake, flat breads and pizza crust together.  We're now completely out of flour. 

Our little town had a big festival for the holiday weekend complete with a car show.  The baby rode in a carrier and we all went downtown to check out the classic cars and eat ice cream.  It was really nice to get out as a family.

I've also had some time to myself this week and have been working every day to slowly dig the garden out of neglect.

There's food in here, promise.

Tada!  The same spot after weeding.  Hello, herbs! You can't really tell from the picture, but that sage plant is a good foot and a half wide.  And the lemongrass is huge.

 

Parts of the garden are either done for the season already (snow peas, lettuce) and are being pulled out or they're so hopeless that they're being replaced (this deer-eaten chard).  I'm hoping to make it to a greenhouse tomorrow and find some transplants to fill in the gaps. 

The weeds are being carried over to the poultry yard where they're being gone through and eaten by the birds.  Another problem in the garden is that it's being attacked by Japanese Beetles.  We had zero last week and now they're everywhere.  I want to remember when this happened so that next year I can get traps out in time.  They're really chewing up the cannas.  I'm feeding probably a couple hundred of them to the poultry every day.  It's SO gross but the birds, especially the geese, love them.

Well, enough for tonight,  Time to try and get a little rest before the baby wakes up.  He's been wide awake in the middle of the night the past couple of days, which is adorable but tiring.

And now we are a family of four

Back home and doing wonderfully.

All tiny fingers and toes accounted for.

Craft! Glamour with a refurbished vintage Samsonite train case

I totally staged this photo.  But the book choices are pretty appropriate, I think.

This project was just finished up last night, a vintage Samsonite train case picked up at the thrift store.  The inside of the case is immaculate and the tiny keys were still sealed in the envelope.  The outside was really tired looking though.  I love how it turned out.

As found.  The exterior is sort of a faux-leather and wasn't coming clean ever.  Plus I just wasn't excited about the color.  I taped the center stripes off with painter's tape and spray painted the case with two coats; the first a pale blue and when I didn't like that it was painted over it with a sage green.  After the tape was peeled away the spots I missed, along with the center stripe, were painted with a small brush.  Over spray was cleaned up with a nail polish remover pen.  The original cream color was kept as striping and cleaned up with a magic eraser - it worked wonders to brighten it. 

This case makes me so happy to look at but I have no idea what I will ever use it for.  It just feels like a tiny bit of vintage glamour.  And don't we all need that sometimes.

I suppose it could be just be used as an overnight case, if you're a gal who travels light.

Let's ask some Hitchcock women who have overnighted on short notice.  Lisa carried a tiny designer bag for her perfectly innocent sleepover at Jeff's in Rear Window.

And when Melanie stayed at Annie's house in hot pursuit of Mitch in The Birds, she carried her belongings in a purse and a paper bag.  I had forgotten about that.

So... we'll say the train case falls somewhere in the middle?

Io moth, borage, garden harvest

Look who stopped by today! 

 Isn't it gorgeous? We leave the front porch light on at night and it was resting on the siding this morning.

Tiny pocket-sized Golden Guide circa 1964. 

We've owned a couple of the large, expensive Peterson field guides over the years and I swear these little Golden Guides are all the average person will ever need.  Plus, the illustrations!

Not only is it an Io moth but a lady one at that. If she grew up eating corn she must have traveled from the farm up the road, no roses here.  I always assumed that cornfield was sprayed within an inch of everyone's lives but maybe not. 

I put her in this pot for the day, away from any spider webs.

Random picture of Borage in the fava beans. Plant Borage once and it comes back forever. Everywhere. Happily it's beautiful and pollinators love it.

Picked this morning: double handful of green beans, some snow peas, fava beans and a huge pile of kale (already in the freezer).  There's so much kale out there and the bugs haven't gotten to it *quite* yet.  Sadly, deer have been eating the most of the chard regularly. Even so I think I'm going to be able to freeze all of the organic greens we can eat this winter for the cost of two cheap seed packets, which seems a small miracle.

Postage stamp craft, a false alarm & freezing produce

Another little project finished.  A wooden "H" for the kids' room, decoupaged with stamps.  This was actually finished awhile ago but this week it finally got a hanger put on the back so it can go on the wall.  I love it and plan on making a second one, maybe in green.  It took sooo many stamps to cover all of the curves and surfaces but was so much fun.  

Oh, stamps.  So much fun.

We had a bit of a day yesterday.  I was positive I was in early labor for, oh, hours.  I had been to the doctor that morning.  The signs were all there and it got progressively worse as the day went on.  We put the family on high alert, got the place ready and packed hospital bags.  I went to bed having light contractions and when we woke up this morning... nothing.  At all.  I checked under the blankets for a baby but... no.  I feel totally normal.  40 weeks pregnant normal but normal still.

So we had to call everyone and say "oops, not yet".

The little man has taken to hugging my belly and yelling "come out, baby!" into my belly button.

So, when you're feeling totally miserable and your husband is rushing around trying to get the place ready, what do you do?  You waddle around pulling things from the garden and freezing them.

Four small bags of snow peas for winter stir-frys.  I blanched these 90 seconds.

Stripped all of the "mostly ripe" currants off the bush and froze them.  I think we're going to get another currant bush, maybe a black one. These are delicious and we're starting to get nice harvests now.

Big handfuls of greens; chard, kale and orach.  Blanched 60 seconds.  We loved using these last winter.

What happens when I don't crop my belly out of pictures :)

So the next big thing I'd like to wrap up around here is this whole baby incubation project. We all can't wait to meet our little guy.