The Daily Harvest: August 2009

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Daily Dinner

Gazpacho from our tomatoes and cucumbers.

Noodles from the chicken's eggs, with herbs.

Quinoa not from our garden with ground cherry chutney.

It's nice to be home!

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Daily Canning

I had never made dilly beans before. I looked at lots of recipes on the internet, and called a friend whose beans I liked last year.

I made myself an assembly line on ingredients so we could pack the jars easily when they came out of the dishwasher.

Here are the finished beans.
We'll see how they are.
So that I remember for later the recipe I used was approximately:

In a pint jar:
1/4 teaspoon each of mustard seed
coriander seed
black peppercorn
cloves
1/8 teaspoon allspice
1 clove garlic
2-3 slices jalapeno
piece of cinnamon stick
bay leaf
1 slice orange gypsy pepper

The liquid was 1/2 water 1/2 vinegar, with a little salt

Daily Harvest

This summer hasn't been hot enough for the tomatoes to do as well as last year.
We are still getting enough that we are eating fresh tomatoes every day and we still have enough to can.
Here are some of our favorite varieties this year:

These are Japanese Black Trifele

A new favorite this year.

Black Krim, this did really well last year as well.

Lucinda, another new favorite

Here is what I picked today!

Monday, August 24, 2009

Preserving

Here is the sauce we made!

We don't have very many red tomatoes this year!

Daily Harvest

We came home from Chiapas late Sunday night and this is what we picked Monday!

We invited friends over to help us can tomato sauce. Thank you Roxanne, Guy and Sheri!

Monday, August 10, 2009

Chicken Poop

Our chickens eat glass.
I'm sure our chickens aren't alone in this. I'm sure this is something common to urban chickens.
They also eat small rocks that collect in their gizzards. These rocks grind up their food, similar to what our teeth do for us.
I think that they are eating the glass for the same purpose that they eat rocks: to grind their food. The glass is no match for the rocks though. When our chickens poop it back out again the result looks like beach glass.

This photo is of one chicken poop after the poop has gotten washed away. There are a couple of tiny rocks, some sand, but mostly ground up glass.

Tomatoes

We don't use tomato cages. Jonathan borrowed a post hole digger this year to get our poles firmly in the ground. We planted beans around each pole, and two tomato plants between each pole.

As the beans grow they twine around the poles, but as the tomatoes grow they need support. As the plants were growing this spring and early summer we tied them up, a little more every week.

Here I am trying to get the string in the right place so that it holds up the tomato plants, and so that it does not touch the bean vine.

Here is what it looks like after a couple of months of weekly tying!

Look! We were already getting green tomatoes! I think that this photo is from early July.

Garlic!

Here are up close images of the braids. I'm so excited to have garlic all year! The funny thing is, we just finished this year's harvest, and it's already almost time to plant it for next year!

Am I the first person ever to think of braiding dried flowers into the garlic braid? It is so beautiful.

Garlic!

All of the garlic in the shed was dry, so we took it down. Here is Jonathan showing you how much there was.

Then I rubbed off the outer layer of skin and dirt from each bulb and cut off the roots.

Here is before and after I rub it.

Then I braided it.

I made two braids. One of the best bulbs that is HUGE, and another small one that I braided with dried flowers.

We will see if we met our goal of growing all of our garlic for the year!