Most of the garden is pretty well done for us this year.  I expected  that pumpkins would take much longer to develop…you know, so they would be timed right for the coming of the Great Pumpkin (Charlie Brown).  I suppose real pumpkin farmers plant their seeds a bit later than we did.  Anyhow, our pumpkins turned orange and were looking awesome last week so I decided to harvest them.  They are winter squash so I expect that they will last a good long time (’til Halloween at least I hope!)

I have enjoyed thinking about saving seeds and have done it some but this year I was impressed and really see the point of saving seeds from the best fruits.  We’ll keep seeds from the best of these pumpkins again this year.  I’ll be playing Gregor Mendel with pumpkins here in W-by-God-VA.  Mark my words folks…WV pumpkins are gonna be incredible in a few years!  You can say you heard about it here first!  Well, either that or I will end up living in a monastery when Emily gets fed up and throws me out…I am hoping for the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!

For a bit, I considered the possibility that someone was playing a compost pile prank…but who on Earth would do that?  Too bad I don’t have any composting friends though…could be interesting.

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand…does anyone have any idea what this is?  Maybe a mutation of some hybrid pumpkin or something?  Ginny chomped on one, but quickly left it alone (and you know, my dumb dog eats poop so that ‘s saying something!)

We have found other weird stuff in the course of gardening…

Look! A baby green bean!

We were a little late getting the garden in place and it seems to be reminding us of that lately.  All sorts of stuff came up and it all looks nice…we have beans and squash, and tomatoes.  There are all sorts of peppers and corn coming along.  We haven’t really eaten anything from the garden yet.  Lots of people are eating from the garden and I am jealous!  I just hope we’re ready by Halloween!

I have been running around doing all sorts of stuff (sounds like a good excuse, right?) so Emily and her grandfather have done the bulk of the weeding this year.  The garden looks beautiful and the end of this month is going to be insane!  Like most garden people, it’s a ton of fun at first and by the end, you are ready for a plague of some swarming creature to finish you/the garden off.  For me now, though, I am ready to pick and can stuff and eat!

We were in such a hurry to plant earlier this spring, that we accidentally planted corn and beans over top of one another.  Of course, that’s a perfectly acceptable way of planting and it is doing well so far…it was just not planned.  Seeing things grow in spite of us might be one of the best parts of messing with a garden…well, besides walking barefoot in dirt and seeing all sort of new bugs I can put on Emily’s arm to see her reaction.  Yes, other than those things, seeing stuff grow is my favorite part!

Anyhow, we got lots of stuff in the ground early in May but some stuff we have had to work on for timing reasons.  Two weekends ago we finally got the last of the garden planted.  Abigail was a huge help in getting our dry beans and pumpkins planted.  She marked our rows, planted some seeds, covered some seeds and laughed a lot.  It was a blast being all barefoot in the garden with my smelly little girl!

We checked the garden this weekend after a good rain and everything was up and looking good.  Emily’s Grandpa swears he went down in the morning one day before the rain and nothing was up.  A few hours later after the rain, everything had come up!  That would be cool to see!

So, we are planted and are mostly still weed-free!  Typically we stay ahead of the weeds pretty well so I think our time in the garden is about to increase like crazy!  No more clean fingernails or soft feet in our household!

How the garden area normally looks

We’ve had a bunch of snow this year in WV and it is melting.  Showshoe Mountain in WV actually had more snow this year than they had at Vail, CO.  Snowshoe had 227 inches while Vail had 223.  So, couple the melt with a good bit of rain and we’ve got flooding around Charleston and elsewhere in WV.

Note the fence and white birdhouse posts

The same view...you can barely see the white posts

There's the fence

We live on top of a hill in Charleston so we don’t really have any any danger from flooding at our house.  Our garden, the one I have been itching to get into, is at Emily’s grandparents’ house which is near the river and a creek that drains one of the big nearby hollers.  It is currently under about 5 feet of water.  Nearby houses have significant amounts of water in them and many folks have been forced to leave their homes.  Even with the flooding, the Corps of Engineers report that flood control dams prevented the water from coming even higher (check out the pictures.  We were planning to have Abigail’s birthday party at the South Charleston Rec Center pool…which is now under water).

It’s hard to complain when I consider that our family is safe and our house is intact.  Nonetheless, I am still bummed that the garden is under water and my garlic that was planted last fall is undoubtedly ruined.  I suppose I will have a chance to work in he garden soon enough.  First order of business will be hauling off the trash that washed in.  We’ll have to find a compromise with the ducks and fish we have seen in our garden and consider a new place to plant our garlic this coming Fall.

I decided to make a stevia extract which is a liquid into which the sweetness of the stevia leaves has been concentrated.  I saw a variety of articles and recipes on how to make stevia extract, but two in particular caught my attention.  Each required a liquid to make the extract.  One used water, the other used vodka.  I decided to try both varieties and see which I liked better.

I am not much of a drinker.  In fact, I am pretty much not a drinker at all except for the occasional medicinal shot of brandy when I have a sore throat.  Aside from that, I don’t know the difference between varieties of alcohol.  I walked into the local drug store and headed for the liquor aisle where a huge array of vodkas greeted me.  I didn’t know one brand from another so I decided the surest way to pick a good vodka must be by the aesthetics of the label.  I looked and looked and debated, but I finally settled on Gordon’s vodka.  See?  Doesn’t it just look pretty.  The simple light blue label just seemed pleasant to me…it must be good stuff.

So I got the vodka and headed home.  To make both the vodka and the water-based extracts, I coarsely cut stevia leaves until I had 2 cups for each recipe.  I don’t really know what a coarse cutting is, so I decided to use coarse language as I sliced the leaves into chunks.  I can’t really see how it will help make things sweeter, but if the recipe calls for cussing, I figured I better oblige (actually, I called in Emily…she’s the pro).

So, into a mason jar I added 2 cups of leaves and one cup of my liquid – vodka in one jar, water in another.  I covered each and will let it stand for 24 hours gently shaking the jars a few times during that period.  I started the brew last night and the liquid has turned green by this morning.  The vodka-based extract is greener so I suppose it has drawn more of the essence of the stevia out.  At the end of the soaking period, I will filter each through a coffee filter and then simmer the extract over medium-low heat for 30 minutes to concentrate the extract and remove the alcohol.  It’s best to store the liquid in a jar in the refrigerator for future use.

Everywhere I have read says that I will need to dilute the extract with water before using in a recipe.  I suppose the sweetness of the mix is very powerful.  I’ll know more about that soon!  We’ll use these extracts in cooking and I’ll report back later.

So, what do you think?  Have you heard of or used stevia (or truvia, the store variety)?  Did I buy a descent variety of vodka?

Honeybees and bumblebees and all manner of flying critter visited to taste the sweet nectar. Of course, they got creative and sometimes visited the habaneros right before the sweet bell peppers…not so sweet any more. Everything grew and grew and we watched eagerly, waiting for the chaos of canning and cooking to begin. It’s hard to beat the food we get directly from the garden. It’s hard to beat the fun of cutting and chopping up the harvest and stuffing it into canning jars. It’s hard to beat the sound of the pressure cooker clicking away it into the wee hours of the morning.

but…
“Gee whiz, are we still canning stuff?” “When will this stuff ever end?” “This garden is killing us.” “Oh, just freeze all of that. I can do no more canning!” “Next year, we are absolutely not planting as much!” “This is craziness!” “In fact, I don’t want any garden next year! We need to have a life too!” “NO GARDEN!”

but…
“Ahhhh…look at out pantry! It’s full! That work wasn’t so bad afterall, was it? It’s definitely worth it! I mean, look at all of that free food!” “Free? Do you remember last month when…” “Oh yes, I know, but did you see all of that free food?!” “Yeah, I know.”

“So, it’s a little early, but don’t you think we should think about what we want to plant next year?” “Oh yeah…and all that free food…we should definitely plant more!”

Even though I don’t care much for fall and winter, the sunflowers in the garden certainly do a lot to brighten my day during this time of the year.  Initially, it’s hard to get over their size.  Sunflowers are huge.  Maybe they are too huge to even really hold themselves up, but, as I have said before, I love the optimism that they seem to symbolize.  I suppose in the wild economic world in which we live, their bold yet simple existence is just what I need.

Anyhow, enough of that philosophical stuff…I also am fascinated by the pattern of the seeds in their head and the apparently sweet nectar that draws so many bees and other bugs.  It seems like every time that I look at the sunflowers, they have a new bug climbing on them.  In addition to bouying my mood, they sustain insects in a typically difficult part of the year when most nectar sources dry up.

I love sunflowers…not like I love Edward Cullen or Mountain Dew, but as far as natural things go, they are the tops in my book!

I took down all of the garlic from where it was hanging and loaded it up in the man-van and headed for home.  You see, I treat the man-van very much like most folks would treat a pickup truck.  Emily, on the other hand, sees it more as a family vehichle.  Of course, this causes some contention between us, but I always figure (as someone wisely said) that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.  Anyhow, I loaded all of the garlic into the van and brought with it a bunch of dried dirt.  Emily’s blood pressure headed north as well so I knew the garlic was done.

People process and store garlic in all sorts of different ways, but I like to cut the stalk off leaving only about 1-2 inches still attached to the bulb.  I knock off all of the dirt from the roots and then trim them down to 1/4 inch or so in length.  I peel a few layers of the outer “paper” from the garlic and that’s it.  One should not wash garlic to remove the dirt.  Of course, part of the point of drying the garlic was to remove excess moisture that would cause rot.  Garlic cleans up very nicely without water so I figure, there is no sense in taking a chance.

So, I did an actual count of the garlic we harvested and we have 116 heads hanging in onion sacks in our basement ready for use.  Some we’ll save for seed to plant this October but the rest we’ll use.  If we estimate 6 cloves per head, that means we have 696 cloves of garlic for use this year.

The really cool thing is that garlic is its own best medicine.  It seems to raise the blood pressure of folks in my family, but it also, apparently, is a good way to lower blood pressure as well.  Garlic is almost like a blood pressure perpetual motion device!

We’ve already made plenty of salsa with the tomatoes and peppers, onions, etc that we got. We figured tomato sauce can be used for about everything so we made a batch of that. It’s pretty easy really so it was ideal. We run the tomatoes through our Velox tomato press and then throw it all in a crockpot to cook down.  Some folks boil their tomato puree until it is half the volume.  We just throw it in the crockpot (uncovered) and forget about it for 24 hours.  By then, it is cooked down and we are oficially sauced.  I think we had about 2500 pounds of tomatoes and once it was all cooked down, we ended up with 5 pints of sauce.  We’ll run throuhg several more batches of sauce because it is so handy when we need to make something yummy over the winter!

Neither Emily nor I like cucumbers raw.  Emily doesn’t like them pickled either but she’s sauced, obviously.  Anyhow, I love pickles so we made a bunch with the cukes we harvested this year.  I grow dill too so we definitely made our pickles from some of the freshest ingredients around.  I suppose we could make vinegar, but I don’t think we’re ready for that yet.  Anyhow, I love making pickles because the smells of the ingredients take me back to when my Grandma canned pickles.  She canned tons of stuff and the smells and the warmth of the kitchen remind me of her<sniff, sniff>

Ok, so it was a bunch of fun getting pickled too.  Don’t tell, but I figure we’re get pickled and sauced a bunch more times this summer!