2010 preserving

The last day of the year seems like a great day to post our 2010 food preservation list. This was our third year of preserving in our little homestead. We've kept lists of the past couple of years of what we preserve, the quantity, and then make note of what we actually use. We then designate if we eat the food, or if we give it away as a gift. We keep a list on our fridge and then check off boxes as each item gets used. It is a pretty good system.

Where did all of this produce come from?

• David and I joined a CSA (community supported agriculture) this year, so we got a box of produce each week from a local farmer of our choice. We decided to go with The Kretschmann Organic Farm. Much of what we preserved came from these weekly boxes.

• It may come as a surprise that David canned chicken stock this year. As part of our CSA, we broke our usually vegetarian diet to enjoy 5 pasture raised, organic chickens. Actually, we have only had 4 chickens, because we are saving the 5th chicken for a yummy meal this winter. Besides the fact that the chickens were delicious, we also loved that that we got to send our payment directly to the grower of the chickens we were eating. Here's a link of a photo of grower, Steve Misera and his family with their chicks. A description of the chickens from the Kretschmann's:

(The chickens were raised) without the routine antibiotics which are ingested with every bit of food or water consumed by a typical conventionally raised chicken. They aren’t rushed to slaughter, but allowed to mature to a reasonable weight—about 6 pounds. These are what used to be called “roasters”. You’ll find that you get far more meat per pound than you are used to getting because it’s not all skin and bones. They are great roasted whole—stuffed if you like—it’s like a mini-turkey but doesn’t take so long to cook.

• We got the apples for the apple butter the strawberries for the jam at the farmers' market. Between May and November in Pittsburgh you can find an almost daily market in one of the neighborhoods. I highly recommend checking them out if you haven't already.

• A great deal of our preserving involved tomatoes; we are pretty thrilled with the 47 quarts of pasta sauce we'll be enjoying all year. I'm pretty excited to say that most of the tomatoes we used this year came from own very own garden. We kept weighing the endless tomato harvest this year and the final count was around 316 pounds! I smile every time I think about it.

• The bushel of peaches came from David's parents, when they visited us this summer from South Carolina.

• The mulberries were from trees around our neighborhood.

2010 Preserving
Frozen:
Mulberries - 2 quarts
Greens - 2 bags
Pesto cubes (spinach, garlic, pea shoots)
Oven dried tomatoes with olive oil - 9.5 (1.5 pints)

Dried:
Mint - 3/4 cup
Oregeno - 1/2 cup
Tomatoes - 3 (1.5 pints)
Zucchinni - 1 (1.5 pints)
Apples - 2 quarts

Canned:
Strawberry Jam - 17 (8oz)
Peach Butter - 18 pints
Peaches, raw packed - 10 quarts
Peach juice - 4 quarts
Tomatoes, raw packed - 5 quarts
Pasta sauce - 47 quarts
Chicken stock - 6.5 quarts
Green Tomato Pickle Mix - 12 pints
Apple butter - 5 pints, 3 (12oz), 7 (8oz)

Ferments:
Mixed Veggies - 1 quart
Sauerkraut - 2 (1/2 gallons)


Let us know if you want to try some of what we preserved. We really enjoy giving and trading our canned goods. 2010 was an eventful year for our little homestead! We are already searching through seed catalogs for next year, daydreaming of fresh produce, beautiful blooms and dirt under our fingernails.

May you and yours have a blessed start to 2011!
Cheers!

end of season gardening

Yesterday the weather was gorgeous, so I did some work in the garden.
The kale plant is gearing up for the colder weather. Gotta love this hardy plant.

The globe artichoke is also looking pretty good still; hopefully we'll be picking artichokes next year!

Our apricot tree seems to be unaware of the changing seasons and she is still hanging on to her leaves.

The end of the season always means we've got to clean up the garden. I took the umbrella down, put the grill under our back porch and went to work on the plants. After un-staking the tomatoes, I chopped off the tops of the plants and left them on top of the soil to act as mulch. Since we are trying to build up the soil, I left the roots of the plants intact and in the ground to hopefully minimize the loss of organic matter.

Before the first frost, David went out and picked about 63 pounds of green tomatoes, so we are trying to keep up with them as they ripen. I made more oven dried tomatoes and I've also made a couple batches of really yummy Roasted Tomato Soup (my mom sent me the recipe).
Thought I'd share that with you all. Enjoy!

Roasted Tomato Soup

Toss together in a bowl:

5# tomatoes, stemmed and quartered

6 garlic cloves, smashed

¼ c olive oil

salt and pepper

Transfer to a casserole dish and roast about 40 minutes at 450 degrees until very soft.

Saute in 2T olive oil over medium heat:

1 c onions, chopped

Stir in:

2 c water (if tomatoes are dry; otherwise, don’t use it…I did not)

2 tsp sugar (I used honey instead)

½ tsp kosher salt

¼ tsp red pepper flakes

roasted tomato mixture, including all of the juice

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes. Puree the soup in a blender in small batches (no more than halfway full) until smooth

optional: add ½ c heavy cream (gradually so it doesn’t curdle).

lots of changes in the garden

Last weekend, we took advantage of the nice weather and got to work: harvesting seeds, picking veggies, taking down the old fence posts, and forming one more raised bed in the back part of the lot that had been behind the old fence.

On the left are some lettuce seed stalks. I bundled these together along with the sunflower stalks (picture on right), covered these bundles with netting and hung them on our back porch to collect the seeds.

Our pepper plants are finally producing. Anyone know of anything good to make with lots and lots of peppers? David made pickled peppers last year with my family's huge lot of peppers...I'm craving more of a pepper relish...any good recipe suggestions?
Of course, we have our weekly haul of tons of tomatoes (we've canned over 40 jars of sauce so far!). And last, but not least - I collected basil seeds in the brown lunch bag.


Meanwhile, David got to work on the old fence posts - he used a pruning saw to cut these down.

We then used the same steps that we had with the other raised beds. We put down cardboard, formed the keyhole bed, and filled in with soil, cover crop seeds, and finally covered all of it with straw.

we think it turned out really nice!

This is the view from the back corner of our lot.

The view from the front.
The view from the middle of the lot.
View from our second floor window.

Before and After: The top left picture was taken last summer. The bottom left picture was taken at the beginning of this summer and the picture on the right was taken this past weekend.

We are really happy with how it is shaping up!

tomatoes!

So far, we've picked over 160 pounds of tomatoes this summer. We've had mostly romas (my personal fave). We've canned a LOT of sauce.

new fences

After many months of waiting, we finally have fences.

We now have a steel fence along the front sidewalk.

In the back, we have a shadow box style cedar fence.




We still need to take out the posts from the old fence.

Bye Bye, Carpet

Rebecca has wanted to get rid of the carpet in this house since... oh... before she bought it. A couple weeks ago, we finally felt motivated to action, in large part due to seeing the refinishing work of the folks over at Torley Manor. The plan: tear out the carpet, see exactly what was underneath, and then figure out what to do next. (We love plans that are easily condensed to Step 1: Do something irreversible, and Step 2: Figure out Step 3.) We knew the floor underneath was tongue and groove pine, since we could see its underside from the basement. The condition of the pine, however, was the big unknown. If the floor looked great, we’d sand and polyurethane. If it was unsandable (due to lead or some other gunk), we’d prime and paint. If it was really nasty, we’d probably put some sort of laminate floor on top.

It only took about four hours to go from a fully-furnished and carpeted living room to a room with a bare wooden floor. The newly uncovered floor is pine. We assume it’s the original floor in the house. Most of the floor has never been finished and is in pretty decent shape for being about 120 years old. Around the outside, there’s a few layers of paint, the most recent being brown. After a little research, I learned that the floor probably had a large, rectangular area rug in the middle, where the pine has never been finished.

We knew we could sand and polyurethane the unfinished central area of the floor, but what about the painted border? Could we also sand or strip that paint? Is it lead paint? To find out, I tracked down a lead test kit at a local paint store. (Thanks again to Emma and Q!) These kits contain eight little markers. Each marker has two glass vials inside that you crack open by squeezing the marker. Then, you shake to mix the chemicals and smear the stuff on potentially leaded paint. If it turns red, there’s lead. I decided to test two areas: the brown painted area and the bare wood. Why the bare wood? Well, I didn’t really know for sure that it had never had any finish on it. And I really don’t want lead poisoning. Really. So the test on the bare wood appeared negative. The test on the brown paint looked brown. Well, maybe reddish brown, but maybe just paint brown. I couldn’t tell what the test said about the brown paint. So I tried a third area that had white paint on top. That area tested clearly positive for lead. So we decided to paint the border and try to sand and put a clear finish in the center of the floor.

I'll post more later as the project progresses....

Poison Ivy, Round 2

Back in the beginning of May, I got a nasty poison ivy rash on my arms and neck. We were down in SC at the time, so I assumed I had run into the poison ivy while helping my dad prune the plum tree in my parents' yard. However, we didn't see any poison ivy around. The mystery was revealed when Rebecca and I got back home and saw the unwelcome leaves-of-three mixed in with another, innocuous, ivy. I got suited-up in long sleeves and rubber gloves and pulled out as much of the poison ivy as I could. I filled up four trash bags with the stuff that day.

More recently, I've been noticing the poison ivy re-emerging, mostly around the edges of our garden. It climbs our cinder block wall in the back and becomes one with the chain link fence. It also created a long root network running through the gravel. This morning I went out for the second round of poison ivy clearing. I only filled two bags this time around, but I got some of the larger roots pulled out. Hopefully that will slow its next inevitable assault.

lots of changes in the garden...

Dodging raindrops over here, we are trying to keep up with all of the growth - vegetables and weeds. Here are some pictures we've been taking for the past couple of weeks.
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It turns out that I really enjoy demolition work. Here I am tearing down the old fence.
Our peach and apricot trees have lots of leaves on them!

coreopsis

kale

chocolate mint and spearmint


cosmos

teepee tomato staking

weeding

relaxing

lettuce

cabbage

oregeno


pepper

petunia

david behind the really tall buckwheat covercrop

feverfew

rhubarb (1st year, so we can't eat it)

parsley

and of course, a bouquet

More Raised Beds

Here's another big post to get us caught up to yesterday's work in the garden. (I should also mention that this post is being co-written by David AND Rebecca.)

In anticipation of our second truckload of soil, we again spread out cardboard to smother the weeds. Then the big day came for the truck to arrive.

We thought we'd include some pictures of the truck delivery, since the size of the truck was so ridiculous compared to the houses on our street. We also thought our nephews, who like trucks, might enjoy seeing the pictures.


We knew the pile of dirt would cover up the path and cardboard we had set up, but we didn't have much of a choice since the lot is so compact. Later on, we had to dig out the path that had been covered by the giant pile of dirt.


We spent almost an entire day shoveling dirt into the beds on the front end of the property.



Yesterday, we were able to plant annuals. We were surprised that we were this far along. This past winter, while we were imagining what the garden would look like, we didn't anticipate having the raised beds with annuals and cover crops planted by mid-May. We are experimenting this summer with interplanting vegetables and flowers. The theory is that mixing several different plants together is beneficial.


Under all that straw, we scattered a blend of cover crop seeds. I think we'll save the info on the cover crops for another post, though.


Here are some awesome aerial shots taken from our second story window. You can see the keyhole beds have been filled with annual flowers and veggies.

And below, you can see the soon-to-be-demolished fence. Our property line is about 13 feet beyond the old fence (with the open gate). That's our neighbor's table with chairs out there on their side.