Can I go back to last week?

Last week I dropped Taja dog off at the vet, where she was being kenneled while we went to Oregon for Thanksgiving.  That was Friday.  I took her bed, and a chew toy, and handed her over.  I was a little sad when I climbed into the car.  I love that dog, and I was going to miss her.

I had no idea.

Monday morning the vet called to tell us that Taja had died in her sleep.  Her heart just stopped.  I'm glad it was quick, but my heart hurts that she was not home with her family.

She was a stinky, drooly dog, with floppy ears and a wiggly bum, and we loved her.  It seems a little silly to grieve so much for a dog, but she was really a member of our family.  We're going to bury her in the yard, and plant a tree to mark her grave.

Well miss you, puppy.

Taja Harley Quinn 

(she was AKC papered, and they require ridiculously long names)

AKA Taja, Taja dog, or Puppy.

April 2002- November 21, 2011

Puppy Taja

We have a lot of pictures like this.  Taja was always kind of in the background of whatever was going on.

Taja loved playing soccer with us.

Two Christmases ago

Camping

Chewing a bone, enjoying the sunshine- one of her favorite ways to spend an afternoon.

Part of the family.

Photo Update

A teaching CP some sweet soccer skills.

CP at his preschool Halloween Parade.

Our shelf of squash/pumpkins- many of these are now carved and sitting on the porch.

Kyle's getting this area all cleaned up- no more weeds and wood scraps and yard tools jumbled together.

I love watching chickens run across a yard.

J and neighbor B herding the chickens back to their coop.

This was a lot of work.  I did it with the rotary mower.  I was SORE the next day.  The grass hadn't been mowed in a long time, as I mentioned in the previous post- I had to have the boys come out and lift the grass up with rakes so the mower would even catch it- it was so long and matted down.

Not a huge grape harvest this year...  

We're already figuring how many we can drink each month to make them last a year.  :)

Fall Clean Up (part three)

I didn't take pictures again.  But, we forced the boys out the door this morning and they did great picking grapes until the first bucket was full, after that it was painful to keep them working.  We ended up with four buckets to put in the steam juicer.

While we were picking grapes, my Mister mowed the field, pulled the hoses from the big garden and stretched them out on the cement to get warm so he could coil them up and put them away, then he mowed the garden.  We didn't plow because we're not sure if we'll be able to garden there next year when the house is being built.  He did plow the neighbor's garden while I sat and visited.  Our neighbor gave us some horseradish, a huge banana squash, a turkey egg, and some walnuts.  It was a fruitful visit.  :)

Next, I wanted to get the yard mowed, so I pulled out the rotary mower and made the boys come out to rake the grass up so the mower would catch it.  It was really long and matted down, so that took awhile.

My Mister cleaned out the boat and laid the cover out to dry.  We need to cover it with a more waterproof tarp this winter so we don't get water build up inside it.  He also weed whacked around the driveway under the grapes.

Next up: making grape juice.  I also need to clean out the black raspberry patch, but I'm not sure I'm going to get to that.

Fall Clean Up (Part Two)

Saturday we had a lot of non-yard stuff to do, so we didn't get started on any of the yard work until close to 4pm.

My Mister started weed whacking around all the fruit trees while I pulled weeds from the strawberry bed, and cleared a place for garlic in another bed.  I added compost, and got nearly a pound of garlic cloves planted.  We planted Music that we ordered from my favorite seed company, Seed Savers Exchange, and covered the garlic with a thick layer of straw mulch.

Next was to weed whack all the strawberries down to nubbins and cover them with a thin layer of straw.  Next spring the plants will grow up through the mulch.  By weed whacking the plants now, the plants will be healthier and have better air circulation next spring.

We also gathered up the watering lines from the raised beds and pulled the tomato plants that don't have tomatoes on them still.

My Mister checked on the bees, and there aren't a lot of them.  He's a little concerned that last month when he cleaned out the crooked comb, he might have killed the queen.  We'll continue to watch the bees to see if their numbers continue to decrease, or if they build up again.  There were some brood cells, but not many.  Worst case, we may be buying bees again in the spring.  Hopefully we learned enough this year, that we can avoid the crooked comb in the future and don't have to do such invasive work on the hive.

My Mister shucked all the corn, and put it in a bucket in the chicken coop storage area, the birds have already eaten/scratched all of the grass in their new run area, so they'll appreciate the corn cobs to play with.

The big pumpkin is finally starting to turn orange, but I don't think it will be orange by halloween.  We'll see.

We moved the leftover hay into the chicken coop storage area, and will try to keep the kids out of it so we can use it in other areas.  I want to use it to mulch over the artichoke plant once I cut it down.  I'm still waiting for it to flower so I can collect some seeds.  If I could get five or six plants to survive a winter, we'd be pretty set for artichokes.

Fall Clean Up (part one)

This wasn't part of fall cleanup, but I had the picture, so here it is...  I tried out a new french bread recipe and we all liked it quite a bit, plus it was less work overall than the "artisan bread in 5-minutes-a-day" recipe that I was using.  It made three pretty nice sized loaves.  

We pulled out all the corn.  The cobs that were still on the stalks we are saving to feed to the chickens.  They're mostly dried out, but the chickens don't seem to mind.  So we'll let the rest of these dry out and give them out a few at a time.  Our corn patch actually produced quite a few ears, but I never thinned it, so the ears are all tiny, and it was hard to get into it to pick much.  We also cut off the sunflower heads.  I'll save some seed to plant more next year, and the rest I think I'm going to try roasting.  If it turns out well, we'll plant them more seriously next year.

I was hoping for a better butternut squash harvest, and there were only two jarrahdale squash, but we ended up with more pumpkins than I thought we'd get, considering our watering system didn't work out quite as well as we hoped it would.  

We picked the dried beans, we'll let them finish drying out, and shell them, and save the seed for next year.  This is my first year saving bean seeds, so I'm not sure how much I need, I'll post an update when we shell them.

We cleaned all the wet, gross, smelly wood shavings out of the chicken coop and replaced them with new, clean, dry shavings.  It smells so much better in there!  We also added a roost bar to help them get to the two side nesting boxes.  They were piling up in the middle box half the time instead of going in the other two.  Silly birds.  

My Mister ran the corn stalks through the chipper, and we added that, and the poo/shavings from the chicken coop to the big pile of grass (from when we mowed the field and RAKED THE WHOLE THING (that was fun).  Now we just need a rain to moisten the whole thing and it will really get hot.  There is already some nice compost in the bottom from just the grass.

Here's a before shot of where the chicken run used to be:

And here's where it is now- we moved the run and the little feeding area lean-to so that the chickens could scratch a new area, the whole thing was getting stinky, so hopefully some fresh land helps, and lets the old area recover a little.  In the spring we can move them back

I left two pumpkins in the garden since they were still green.  A smaller one, and then this HUGE one.  I  don't think it will turn orange in time for halloween, but I'm hoping we can get it pureed and in the freezer.  

Things to do another weekend:  

Weed whack strawberries, and cover with mulch 

Clean out raised beds

Save seeds from artichoke plants (if the things would ever flower!)

Pull the last of the onions

Put away watering system tubes

Prep and plant garlic bed

Clear out blackcap bed, and add compost

Mow

Pick grapes and do grape juice

Check bees 

Pasta with Roasted Butternut Squash and Sausage

Inspired by our recent trip up to Park City, and our dinner at The Farm, My Mister and I decided to branch out a bit from our regular meals, and try some new recipes using food from our garden.  (The Farm uses mostly local ingredients.)  I found the recipe at allrecipes.com and made a few changes based on what we had available and what sounded good.  It turned out really well, so we'll probably make this one again.  CP loved it and gobbled it up, A and J weren't fans of the squash, but ate it without too much coercing.  The squash and onion came from our garden.  See the link for the original recipe, below I've written it based on the changes we made.

2 TBSP Olive Oil

1 Butternut Squash cubed and peeled

1 Large Onion, chopped

Salt and Pepper to taste

1 box rotini pasta (14.5 oz)

1/2 lb hot italian sausage (we used buffalo, but pork or turkey would work well too)

1 TBSP flour

1/2 C milk

1 clove garlic, minced

2 TBSP balsamic vinegar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Coat a glass oven safe dish with the olive oil. Place the squash and onion in the pan, and season with salt and pepper. Roast 30 minutes, or until squash is tender. (Don't overcook the squash or it will be mushy, ours was perfect right at 30 minutes)

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Place pasta in the pot, cook for 8 minutes, until al dente, and drain.

 In a large skillet over medium heat, cook the sausage until evenly brown.  Mix in the flour and garlic. Transfer the cooked squash and onion to the skillet.  Pour in the milk.  Continue cooking until heated through and milk thickens slightly. Gently mix in the pasta. Transfer to a large bowl, and toss with balsamic vinegar to serve.

Top with Parmesan cheese.

Thanks again to Home Storage Skills for the idea.  I washed and quartered the pears (and I took the stems off since stems in grape juice does affect the flavor of the juice), and cooked them for 2 hours in my steam juicer.  With grapes 2 hours gets jut about all the juice out, but the pears had hardly cooked down at all.  I could have given them another hour, but I decided to call it good.  I didn't want to cook so much of the juice out that the sauce had no flavor left.  After they cooled a bit in the juicer, I scooped everything into the strainer, and ended up with 4 quarts of juice (plus a little that we drank already- it's delicious) and 6 quarts of sauce- which is still on the runny side.  I really probably should have cooked the pears for another hour in the juicer.  The sauce was still plenty sweet.

Things I've been doing

While playing out in the yard, I discovered a few HUGE peaches (I posted a picture in an earlier post), we canned those and got one canner full of quart jars.  Not a lot, but it's more than we had before.

I also discovered that the apple trees had a few apples on them.  My Mister picked them and we had a bucket full.  Most of them had some bad spots to cut out, but after all that we still ended up with 6 quarts of applesauce.

I've been dehydrating more plums, and made a batch of plum/pear jam.  It looks just like the plum jam, but you can taste the pear in it.  I like it, but I don't love it so much that I think it's a good use of my small supply of pears.

I attempted pear sauce in the victorio strainer, but ended up with a slightly thicker juice.  Not quite what I was hoping for.  Searching online revealed the best way to make pear sauce is to peel and chop the pears, then cook them down.  Pear sauce was my idea to avoid having to peel them (otherwise I would have just canned the pears).  Now I'll either can the rest, or dehydrate them.  I'm looking for the easiest option here, since I'm running out of time before the great grape deluge of 2011 kicks in.

When I was picking the pears, I was trying to think of a way to store them so they didn't bruise while they were ripening, and I thought of these cardboard crates the raspberries came in.  They worked great. I just wish I had twice as many.  If you have any, or ever get any, save them for me!  They're not quite big enough for storing winter squash in, so I'll have to think of something else to use them for over the winter, so that I don't have to justify the space they'd take up sitting empty somewhere.

UPDATE:  Thanks to the powers of Google, I discovered this blog post that talks about juicing pears in a steam juicer and canning the juice, then running the pulp through the strainer for the sauce.  My only concern is that with the juice removed, the pulp will be bland, but I think if I don't cook the pears until there is no juice left, it should work out well.

While picking pears, I noticed that the old "weed" rosebushes are covered in rose hips.  I've been reading up on rose hips and am currently deciding what to do with them, they're not ready yet, so I have some time.  I have fond memories of eating rose hips while sitting on the roof of the old grainery that used to be behind our family home.

As far as a new camera goes, I've been holding off.  I do have my iphone that can take pictures, but I'm currently trying to decide whether I want a fancy camera or if a point and shoot will serve my purposes...

Oh Dear, and Plums

My 4-year-old dropped the camera.  I asked him to get it for me so I could take a picture of putting italian plums on the dehydrator.  I shouldn't have asked him to get it, but he does manage to carry things most of the time without dropping them.  So, there won't be pictures of the plum project.

In addition to the dried plums (prunes), I'm also making some pureed plum jam-we discovered this two years ago when I had pureed plums to make fruit leather, but decided, last minute, to make jam instead, and we all really liked the texture of the pureed fruit jam, so we've done apricot jam this way as well.

Update

I haven't posted in nearly a month.  We've been busy with soccer and stuff around the yard, and, whenever something interesting happens, I post about it on facebook, so my mom is right, facebook reduces blog posting.

To finish off my last post, we got the honey strained, and here's what we ended up with:

We've already eaten most of one pint.  The boys LOVE J's recipe for biscuits (that he got out of the Magic Thief book) with "fresh, homemade" honey.  

It's a bit of a sad fruit year, the trees don't have much on them (with a couple of exceptions), the apples all fell before they were ripe.  There weren't very many nectarines, so we ate a couple and dried the rest.

The peach tree finally has ripe peaches on it.  Just a few, but the bonus of not-very-many peaches is that you get ones like this:

And here's a picture for my mom.  Baby E has discovered the washing machine. He likes to watch the water and clothes swirl around.  It's pretty funny to watch him bounce up and down in excitement.

I'm just a little black rain cloud, hovering over the honey tree...

The other day I noticed the clump of bees hanging on the outside of the hive.  Today my Mister finally had some time to go investigate.  He opened the thing up and decided that the crooked combs had been rebuilt crookedly again really needed to be cleared out.  

He cut quite a bit out and spaced the now-empty bars in between straight comb so that they hopefully rebuild straight this time.  This is the picture where I got a little too close and got chased away by a couple of angry bees.  They don't like people stealing their honey.  After getting the combs cleared up, the bees were too riled up for him to do anything with the bees on the outside of the hive, so we're hoping it's not a major problem.  We'll let them calm down for a few days and take a closer look then.  I'm hoping they were just running out of space inside, and had started building comb on the outside- and not that they are getting ready to swarm...  With how much honey we had to cut out, we're a little worried about winter anyway.  We'll see how much they have left and how much more they can produce between now and winter.  

Just a couple of fatalities.

We tried some of the honey comb.  The kids were not a fan of the wax.  The honey was so sweet that I had a hard time eating my spoonful.  It needed a good biscuit or fresh bread or something.

With top bar hives, you don't use an extractor, you mash all the comb up in a big pot.

Scoop it into jars.

Cover the jar with a mesh-material.  We used cheesecloth, but I think tulle would work a lot better.  (UPDATE: the morning after setting the jars up, very little honey had dripped into the bottom jars, so I stopped by the fabric store and bought 1/2 yard of tulle- it should last for quite awhile- the difference was amazing, at this rate they might be done in a few hours!)

Place an empty jar (with ring) on top of the jar with mashed honeycomb.

Tape them together really well.

Invert.

It's supposed to be done by tomorrow morning, but I think the cheesecloth is slowing things down.  If it doesn't look like there's been much progress by morning, I'll go by the fabric store to get some tulle to try again.

Raspberries

When I was younger, I used to climb this doorway just like CP is doing in the picture (A taught him how).  I'd get to the top and my siblings would say, "RAAAASSSBERRRIIIIEEEESSSS".  If you've seen Thoroughly Modern Millie you'll know why that was funny enough to make me fall.  That's not what this post is really about, but that's how my brain works..

Thursday, some friends from my former neighborhood posted on facebook that they were getting a really great deal on cases of raspberries from their produce coop, I ordered three cases.  We ate a lot (it was nice to have enough that I could just let the boys eat away without feeling like the fruit scrooge), we gave some away, I froze a gallon bag full for use in smoothies, and made a batch of jam.  We debated making more jam, or freezing more, but thought we'd try something different. 

A couple of weeks ago I took the boys to the county fair, when we walked through the 4H building, I noticed there were several entries for canned raspberries.  I thought about some of the things we'd use frozen raspberries for- cooked for a topping on ice cream or cheese cake especially- and thought that would work with canned ones, minus the risk freezing seems to carry around here (we haven't had the greatest luck with freezers, combined with children who like to leave freezer doors slightly ajar for some reason).  Canned raspberries are beautiful.  I wish I had bought several more cases (assuming they taste okay in whatever I use them in- I don't plan on eating them plain).  

Ratatouille (AKA More Things to do with Zucchini)

My sister gave me an eggplant, and some unusual-type tomatoes, so I thought I'd try making ratatouille.  Turns out it's pretty similar to my italian summer stew.  I've just never added eggplant before, because I think it's disgusting, and don't ever buy/grow it.

Turns out it was pretty good.  The kids even sort of ate it.  Baby E LOVED it, and I had a hard time scooping it onto his tray fast enough.  I started out just giving him slices of zucchini, since he's had that before, but before too long, I was just scooping piles of everything and letting him have at it.

I sort of got my recipe from the Joy of Cooking and a recipe a friend posted on facebook awhile back, but I don't follow recipes very well, and also thought that instead of chopping the veggies, everything should be sliced thin like in the movie.

Ratatouille

Thinly slice onions, and sautee them in a pan with lots of olive oil and garlic until they're almost carmelized.  Remove from pan and set aside.  Layer thinly sliced eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes (tomatoes don't really slice thinly, but do what you can), and some of the onions, some chopped bell pepper (red would be pretty, I only had green anaheims, so I used those), and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Repeat until your pan is full or you've run out of veggies.  Top with a liberal splash of olive oil.  Cover and cook on very low heat for 20-30 minutes.  Add a little water if necessary- if things dry out, the bottom will burn...  Remove lid and simmer for 10 more minutes if there's a lot of liquid in it still.

I served mine over pasta (with parmesan cheese, of course), because I knew the kids wouldn't eat it as the only thing for dinner.  It worked out great.  The best thing is that a large portion of dinner came out of the garden right before I cooked it.

(I'm thinking I should relabel my blog, "things to do with zucchini".  We tend to eat it just about every night at this time of year...)

Another thing to do with zucchini

Slice it thin, and lay it on top of a pizza.  Sprinkle parmesan cheese on top (because zucchini is so good with parmesan).  This pizza was about my favorite one we've ever made (My Mister made it- he's getting to be quite the pizza chef).  It had sauce, mozzarella cheese, bacon, green peppers, zucchini and parmesan cheese.  The other pizza (the one that the kids ate) had bacon and pineapple.  (Obviously this is not a vegetarian dinner like the label says, but leave the bacon off and you're good (maybe slightly less good)).

July 24th (observed)

Since Pioneer Day fell on a Sunday, it was "observed" today, and my Mister got the day off work.  He went for a bike ride in the morning while I ran hills on the treadmill (he got the better deal this time...).

Other things we did (I just realized that several of the pictures are from Saturday...):

These apricots are actually from yesterday.  He picked them saturday and we didn't get to them.  The mushy ones we pureed and then canned.  8 of each kind.

We did beans on Saturday, and also had some chicken broth from the home raised chickens we ate last week, chicken broth and green beans have the same processing requirements, so we put the broth in jars and canned it.  Two and a half pints.  

The boys decided to move their fort from the bush by the front door to this pine tree.  

My Mister spent a lot of Saturday organizing the garage.  He finished (for the most part) today and we can now park in it!  He also built a bike rack out of pvc pipe so we won't have bikes thrown down all over the place anymore.

His other major project was mowing.  He mowed all around the garden, while I played with Keiko dog, she liked sniffing in the weeds, so I think she was a little sad to see the whole thing mowed.

He mowed the field.  There is so much cut grass that we really need to go rake it up.  Who knows when that will happen though.  Taja dog enjoyed the clipped grass.  She made herself comfortable in a shady spot and watched Kyle clean out the garage.

We also got 3 eggs today.  They're still pretty tiny, but seem to be getting bigger.