15 Free Minutes

Time to really get going on the garden! This week has been a lot like spring even though its barely mid-January. I've been working on pruning and mulching lately. Yesterday I cleared out a large area in the back yard that had been filled with rocks and pea gravel. The plan is to surround it with a chicken wire fence to protect it from the chickens and use it to try my hand at corn again.

Last season, it became obvious that the peach tree was affected by leaf curl. After reading from many sources and asking around it seemed the consensus was to spray the entire tree with copper sulfide. I hate to use anything on the plants but compost and DE but I really can't bear to lose my peach tree. Scott bought it form me shortly after we got married and it was the first thing that we planted together. So, I pruned it well and sprayed it down. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will keep it healthy.

One of my goals this year is to grow wheat. I have never grown wheat and I don't know anyone who has grown wheat, but it's really just a grass....right? We'll see how that goes!!

8 Days A Week

Did I say that we took a vacation before the craziness of spring planting???



Every day, seedlings are ready to go out, ground is waiting to be cleared, squash need watering, beds need weeding, wigwams to be made. This is it!! Our long winter is over!!



Last week I cleared some ground in the front yard and set up a new bed. This week I planted eggplant and peas there. Still some room left, cucumbers maybe?



Near that, I planted out the corn seedlings, they are already a foot tall and growing fast. This is my first try at corn. I have read they are nitro-hungry so I'm stewing up some rabbit poo tea. Seamus keeps me in a steady supply of poo!!!



Behind the corn, I have 5 tomato plants. Last year, I tried companion planting with marigolds and it worked very well. I didn't have any pest problems on the tomatos so this year I planted even more marigolds. They are pretty too (which is good for the girls who would have the whole yard filled with flowers).



In the corner I put in an artichoke plant. They're not my favorite thing to eat, but the kids love them and so do the in-laws. Hopefully enough to share, if not this year then next year!! I am excited to have something that will produce year after year without having to be replanted every time.

Vacation!

We took a week off before the madness of spring planting to visit a couple of cities in the area. One of my favorite stops was the lovely and whimsical yarn store in Santa Rosa, http://www.castawayyarn.com/yyarn.com/. The best part? Oooh, maybe the giant magpies nest in the front window, the tray of cupcake pincushions, the little dinghy right inside the front door, or perhaps the huge felted wool tornado complete with cows and other livestock!!

The next best thing for me was our visit to the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens. For those of us who have never heard of Luther Burbank before, he was the great man who brought us (among other things) the Russet Potato! Thank you Mr. Burbank. He made his home in Santa Rosa and it has been maintained since his death by various entities and is currently owned by the city of Santa Rosa. I am envious of his home and grounds but most of all, I lust after his marvelous greenhouse complete with a FIREPLACE!!!! What more can you ask for? We were not allowed inside the greenhouse but I did peek inside the windows. It really is the most wonderful of its kind that I have had the privilege to see in person. It has renewed my hunger for a greenhouse of my own.

We will always remember the time we spent in the Petrified Forest. We were definitely ready to get out of the car and the short (less than a mile) walk through the forest to view the petrified trees was just the ticket.

Something like 3 million years ago, a volcanic eruption felled giant and ancient redwood trees. They were buried in ash and over the millena petrified into rock. In the early 1900's, diggers worked to unearth these behemoths and they are still on display today. If you get the chance to visit a petrified forest, go!!! You will not be sorry you went.

After Santa Rosa, we headed south to Half Moon Bay. This is a town that I have spent lots of time in but never have I had the chance to stay over night. Usually we will go for a day trip and stay for a couple hours so we can be home in time to prepare dinner.

My in-laws very generously paid for our room in Half Moon Bay. We stayed in a wonderful hotel on the beach and spent a whole day out enjoying the ocean. Nights were spent in the jaccuzzi looking at stars and listening to the fog horn. We all had a blast but the girls had the most fun! Truly, all they need is a place with a swimming pool and they are satisfied but give them the beach and they're in heaven!

We try to visit the goat farm when we are in HMB.

Harley Goat Farm http://www.harleyfarms.com/ is a wonderful place for kids, adults, foodies, everybody who has a hunger for exploring and discovering local treasures.

We can buy some of their cheeses at our local Whole Foods market, but our favorite is the Ricotta which is only available at the shop. (I believe they will ship it to you as well).

Check out their website, they have a whole wall of awards and accolades to recommend them.

We had lots more stops on our trip. We were only gone for a week, but it feels like forever. Tomorrow, we are going to Full Cirlce Farm

Jam Making Day

Monday was the first Jam Day of the year!! My darling family went to the farmers market and picked up a whole flat of beautiful, delicious, organic strawberries. Last year, I made strawberry, blackberry, plum, and peach jam. The plums and peaches were all home grown, and we buy our berries from the same farmer every year. Lucious!

That jam from last year was enough for us to give a few jars away to family and friends and its still feeding us now! I can't remember the last time we bought jam or jelly. It is such a blessing to be able to make and serve this to my family. Especially since it is something we use nearly every day. Mostly, we eat jam around here. 

Jam, jelly and preserves are 3 different things. The main difference between jam and jelly is the straining. For jelly, you have to strain your fruit/jam through a cheesecloth to get out all the chunks of fruit. Jelly, therefore, is good for people who don't like seeds in their teeth. However, it takes a lot more time and effort. Not to mention the extra cost of buying the cheesecloth.

All things considered, I opt for jam. To make strawberry jam, you need only the fruit, pectin, sugar, lemon juice, butter and a saucepan. To can it, you will need a few more items. Here's the list of the essentials.

1. Jars. You will need a variety of sizes. I use the cute little jars for gifting but most of my jam goes into the pint sized jars. Quart jars are really more for preserving veggies and are too big for jam. Our family can easily consume the pint sized jars within a reasonable time after opening. The first time you buy jars, they come with all the lids and rings you will need. You can reuse the jars and rings as many times as you like, but you will need new lids every time. The jars need to be washed in hot hot hot water and kept hot until you are ready to fill them. I wash mine on the top rack of my dishwasher and then keep them in there with the door shut.

2. A large (really large!!) boiling pot with a removable rack and a lid. Before I bought my canning pot at the hardware store, I used my jumbo stew-pot with the steamer insert. The removable rack keeps the jars from sitting directly on the bottom of the pan or from bumping into each other. This is important because either one of those could cause your jars to crack. Thereby wasting both your jars and the jam!

3. A large mouth funnel. This makes life much easier. These funnels are found in the same aisle as the rest of your canning equipment. They're made just for this purpose and fit perfectly inside the mouth of the jar. A bonus is that you can use it to measure 1/4 inch from the top of the jar. This is called "headspace" and is the max that you want to fill your jars to reduce discoloration and spoilage.

4. A jar lifter. This handy tool looks a lot like spaghetti tongs but its made to grasp jars. The first time I made jam, I tried to use tongs to lift the hot jars out of the boiling water. That was a bad idea!! Several times I lost grip on the jars and they splashed back down into the water. Pretty dangerous, especially if you have little ones running around.

5. A large saucepan or stock pot. You want a tall pot! The boiling fruit and sugar is like lava. You don't want this to boil over and you especially don't want this on your skin or clothes.

6. A smaller saucepan. Here, you will keep your clean bands and lids hot (but not boiling) until you are ready to use them. They sell plastic magnetic "wands" for lifting your lids out but really all you need is a pair of tongs. They work fine for this. It is important to heat your lids because this softens up the sealing compound that is found around the edges. It will get a better seal after being heated and softened.

7. Have plenty of towels around. You will need one laid out to put your clean, hot jars on for filling with your jam. They need to rest about 24 hours after filled in order to seal and "set" (gel). Put them in a place where they won't be in the way.

For about 8-10 jars of jam, you will need these ingredients.

5.5 cups crushed or diced strawberries (about a whole flat will equal 5.5 cups)

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/2 tsp butter

7 cups sugar

1 package fruit pectin

You start with about a flat of strawberries. Wash them up, cut off the stems, leaves, and any parts that look spoiled. Just like any other cooking, the freshness of your ingredients makes all the difference! You need to smash them up pretty good. If you like your jam chunky, leave the chunks bigger. A pastry blender or potato masher works good for this. But you can just dice them up with your knife, too.

Go ahead and fill your water-bath canner half full with water and set to high on the stove. You want this to be ready so your filled jars can go right in. Also, measure out all your ingredients so they are ready to go in, once your fruit get to boiling, you wont have time to stop and measure out 7 cups of sugar!

After you have your berries all mashed up, pour them into your large pot on the stove and add your lemon juice and pectin. Make sure your pectin gets stirred in real good, you can pour it in slowly. The butter/margarine is supposed to help keep your jam from foaming (which is a pain in the ass cause you have to skim all that crud off). I've never done it without the butter, so I don't know if it helps or not. I'd rather just use it and not find out if it is worse without it. I get enough foam as it is.

Bring all this to a full boil and add your sugar all at once. Stir it until its all dissolved and keep stirring, you want it to come up to a rolling boil and boil it like this while your stirring it for a full minute. I wear an oven mitt during this step, the jam is bubbling and steam is rising. Better safe than sorry!

Take it off the heat and skim off the foam. The foam isn't dangerous but you don't want it in your canning jars. It makes people nervous to open a jar of homemade home canned jam and see a bunch of foamy bubbles on top. I usually put all the scraped foam into a saucer and use it at dinner that same day.

Once you've got all the foam off you can start ladling your jam into your jars. Make sure your jars don't have any cracks or imperfections. You've spent a lot of time and put a lot of work on this, a cracked jar can "explode" during the ladling or canning process and ruin your whole batch!

Set your jars out on your towel and put the canning funnel into the first jar. Start ladling in your beautiful jam. Leave head space about 1/4 inch. I usually use the bottom of the funnel as a guideline...don't go past it. After filling your jars, clean off the rims. Make sure nothing is on there or you wont get a seal. Worse yet, you could get spoilage.

Now you've got all your jam in the jars, lift the lids and rings out of the simmering water and finger tighten the rings onto your jars. You don't want it too tight because air has to escape during the canning process.

Using your jar lifter, lower the jars into the boiling water. The water needs to cover each lid by 2 inches. Boil in the water 10-15 minutes. Remove and set them on the towel. They should be left alone for about 24 hours. You should hear a lovely "ping" sound, one for each lid, to let you know the seal is set. After they have cooled and set overnight, test the lid for a seal and clean the jars. Label each with the date and contents and get ready for your next batch of canning!

Cantelope!

Success! Not to celebrate prematurely, but today I found at least 6 grapefruit sized cantelope on the vines!!

Keep your fingers crossed! We will be enjoying these come the heat in August.

I am putting the pumpkin starts in the ground tomorrow. The will have thier own giant patch of the front garden so they will be free to spread. I don't want them to feel inhibited.

Cantelope?

Wow. I thought this year, I would plant a couple of cantelope and see how it went. So far, the vines have spread out almost 10 feet around the plants. I'm starting to worry!! Does this mean all leaves and no fruit?



I harvested the garlic this week. Five georgeous bulbs of elephant garlic. Giant and beautiful. I planted one whole bulb of garlic, 5 cloves, and was able to harvest all of it. I will definitly plant more this winter. It requires a quite a lot of grow time, but it feels almost miraculous. Plant a clove and reap a bulb!!

The bulbs are curing now on the drying rack in the garage. Wow, any time we open the door to do laundry, the smell of garlic pours into the house. I love it!

I bought the origional elephant garlic from one of my favorite farmers at the Urban Village Farmers Market in Campbell. She was very informative and shared lots of good information. Such as garlic from the grocery store will often be engineered to keep it from growing. What must be done to a seed to keep it from doing the thing that it is created to do?

Jeeez! It's My Birthday!

I've got a bit of catching up to do!

Seamus has been "blowing his coat" which is really just a fancy way to say hes shedding all over the place. I've picked, plucked, combed quite a collection of beautiful angora wool from him over the last week. He's still got lots left on him ready to come off. I will be working on this for another week at least.

The chickens are freaked out. Something is eating their eggs before I can get them. Which makes them lay somewhere else, which means I have to hunt them down, which means we havn't been getting eggs lately, which makes me want to get a giant trap and set it up to catch whatever is EATING MY EGGS!!

The garden is still steadily producing. I started a whole new bunch of seeds a few weeks ago and they are all starting to go in to the ground. Beans, squash, turnips, radishes, arugula, cantelope. I am also trying my hand at cilantro, parsley, hollyhocks, bee balm, and japanese maple.

Japanese maple?? Hey, these things go for big bucks!! We have a beautiful and healthy maple in the back yard that is producing seeds. I'm trying to start a few and with a little luck, in a couple of years we'll have several small trees that we can sell.

We're also potting some Sago "palm" pups. These are another popular but expensive tree. Wether it works or not, we'll see!!

I've taken some of the back yard over for more veggies. The chickens still have the majority of the room, but I'm now able to grow more of what I wanted this year. So far I've planted some herbs and beans (from last years seeds). Today I put in 2 tomato plants.

I must be one of the few people in the world who can't grow tomatoes. I try every year and every year I get a few puny little tomatoes. They taste spectacular!!! But there just aren't enough of them. Ahhh. Maybe this year will be different.

Tomorrow is my birthday!! I was able to get the day off and we are going to the farmers market in the morning and then breakfast with the in-laws. It also happens to be fathers day so we'll all be able to celebrate the day together.