Fall harvests

Well in spite of the frost a couple of weeks ago, my tomatoes are finally ripening. :-D
The row cover protected them from the cold, and the wind, and we've had just enough warm sunny weather to ripen a couple dozen nice fruits.   So, I spent the weekend canning, a rainbow of deliciousness.  I did something fun this time and canned red tomatoes together, and canned yellow tomatoes together and one small jar of Green Zebra tomatoes.  The Green Zebras don't look so hot. That nice sunny yellow and light green stripe that they get when ripe, all that disappeared in the canner, so they look like unripe blotchy green tomatoes. lol

Red, Yellow and Green goodness

I still have a small pile of tomatoes on the counter. Not sure what we'll do with them, it's still being discussed.  We've got plenty of jars,  (Thanks Mom!!) so we may roast and can another batch of basil-less sauce for me.  (The zygote has decided basil is nasty and not to be eaten, seen or smelled, and is willing to upchuck food in order to enforce that opinion.  This is very annoying as I've had an awesome year for basil production.)

Dave has finished the chair he was making for Rowen.  We took some birthday money that Grandma DeeDee sent for him, and we bought some wood and a few hand tools and Dave made him a chair, just his size!  We got some stain, so that still needs to go on, but it looks pretty good.

As the days darken and the garden bounty wanes, I'm once again drawn to my sewing room.   I have a massive window quilt that was supposed to be finished earlier in the spring, and is still patiently waiting to be finished with the hand quilting. I have a vest for Rowen made out of fleece, with a zipper and hoodie.  I ordered the zipper this weekend, and I've sewn as far as I can go without it.   While I'm waiting on the zipper, I have started tree pants for the yule tree I'm determined to have this year.  (Tree pants, because not all trees like to wear skirts. hahaha)  I'm making crimson stars on a cream flowered background.  I've not done any stars yet, this will be my first attempt, I'm following the Happy Zombie sew along to help me through the bumps. Thankfully her pattern is a square tree pants, because round things are yet another aspect of quilting I've not got to. :-D  I'll try to put together a star or two and post the results in a day or two. Wish me luck!

Crimson stars on the cream/flowers.

Food Waste Reduction

Americans in general waste a LOT of food. Usually the waste is in kitchens and homes of everyday folks. It's a big deal, and something where action by individuals can improve the situation immensely. Unlike other huge problems I won't mention.

The biggest challenge we face in my house is gracefully handling the fresh produce coming out of the garden every summer. It comes in waves, in bunches and, often it seems, right before a big trip. :-D Squash and green beans tend to be the worst, with lettuce close behind. We did lose some lettuce this spring, I had a gal at the farmers market who was desparate to get rid of lettuce and I took more than we could eat.

But, I'm happy to say, we've not let any green beans die in the fridge. Hubby can take some well deserved credit for that, as he stepped up to the canning plate and canned 4 quarts of green beans out of the garden. So far we've only had one of the summer squash go bad, and that one I think I harvested poorly and shortened it's little life. There's still a lot of summer left, but I'm really hopeful that we can keep up this streak and take full advantage of the bounty. I'm getting better about just getting it cooked, instead of waiting for that perfect recipe. We're both getting better about saying, "No, let's eat in and use up that bag of green beans."

It's not earth shattering, it's not going to save the world. But, when I know there are starving people in Africa, at least I can face myself in the mirror every morning knowing that I didn't leave perfectly good food to die in the fridge.

In related news, Riot 4 Austerity should be starting up August 1st. Sharon over at Casaubon's Book is leading the charge. I'm waiting anxiously for word on where the Riot will be living online.

Spring Planting

Well, spring continues it's warm and welcome march. We've had a windy and stormy one so far. Thankfully the hardneck garlic that is a foot tall can handle the abuse. The onions are hanging in there, as are the cabbages and lettuces. Peas are up, and would be doing better if we could get some rain. There's lots of rain forecasted for this weekend, so hopefully they'll take advantage of that.
I've been planting seeds, as often as I can. Most of the beans are in, my usual mix of Empress and Purple Podded bush beans. I also have a lot of Runner beans planted, in an effort to tempt pollinators into my garden, and shade some weeds out of a trouble spot.
Potatoes are in the ground and hopefully going to sprout soon. (If I didn't kill them by putting them in too early.)
I have parsnips, beets, bok choi, radishes and swiss chard planted as well.
The tomatoes and peppers are still happy in the greenhouse. They won't go out for another couple of weeks.
I don't do all my planting at once. I never have the time for it. So, I'll plant one or two things a day, and somehow it all still gets done. I make sure I'm working in order of cold tolerance, so I spend the blustery early days planting peas, and then when things warm up I choose according to season length. (Things that need every last day of our short season get priority over those that only need half the season.) Sometimes I'm better at this than others, but that's my general plan every year.

Jess mentioned in a previous post how much she enjoyed my winter storage experiment, and how nice it will be to see it from the beginning. There is a lot of truth to that statement. Winter storage planning does start now with these small seeds. Really, it started last fall. I planted my hardneck garlics last October, and that's what I'll eat this winter. I do keep my storage numbers in mind when I'm planning the year's garden. I know, for example, that I want at least 50 garlic heads to get me through the year. I can't physically grow that many, but I easily have the room for 2 rows of 15, which gives me 3/5ths of my yearly garlic needs, from my front lawn. Leaving only 20 that I'll need to buy from a local farmer. Knowing that number makes it easy for me to buy all at once, when the price is right, instead of 1 or 2 at a time every week. To continue the example, I know that I have some jars of tomatoes left, but no jars of green beans. So, this spring I'm devoting more space to green beans and a little less to tomato vines. I always end up buying a bunch of tomatoes anyway to do things like sauce and maybe this way I won't have to buy any green beans. (And maybe my potatoes are dead and I can plant tomatoes in that spot! hahaha) Parsnips handled winter so well that of course I have another row of those planted in the garden. Beets though I'm pretty sure I won't store, I just want some for variety, so those are in a container, where I'll (hopefully) remember to harvest them nice and small and tasty.

You can certainly get by with just throwing seeds in the ground, and if you're just starting your garden adventure, there's no better place to start. But, if you want the most bang for your buck, and return on your time, put some thought into how you want to use the veggies, when, and in what amounts. :-)

Winter Food Storage Wrap Up

Recap: I was aiming to store veggies from November through the end of March.

Onions - I cut up my last storage onion on the 1st of April. So, that worked out really well.
Apples were also done by the 1st of April. As were Sweet Potatoes, and regular Potatoes. And by done, I mean, the last remnants were shriveled and not very edible, or in the case of the potatoes, ridiculously sprouted. I'll finish the garlic by the end of this month.

Lessons learned:
1) I have a pretty good handle on how much we currently eat of certain things. I wasn't way off on any of my figures.
2) We supplemented a lot with fresh citrus, from TX and FL. If that supply was ever cut off, for economic or weather or other reasons, I would need to increase the storage of the more local apples and preserved fruit.
3) I need to get black out curtains in that cellar. No question. The small amount of daylight through the windows was too much and potato sprouting was a huge problem. We lost 10 pounds of our red potatoes due to early sprouting.
4) Wrapping apples individually in newspaper worked well to stave off spoilage. Paper disappeared into the compost pile readily, and was free to begin with, so no wasted money there.
5) 1st of April worked for this experiment, but next year I should try to go to May, as we still had snow on the 1st of April, and there was nothing local to buy.
6) I still need to get more squash worked into our winter diet. We had a couple go bad before I got them cooked.
7) If I want to try for carrots I need to increase the humidity down in that room.
8) It never made it down the recommended 40 degrees F, it hovered around mid 50's, and that still seemed to be ok.
9) In ground storage of parsnips worked REALLY well.

In terms of money, I think we probably saved a bit of cash. Storing the free apples, free garlic, cheap onions, cheap potatoes and cheap squash certainly saved us a lot of money, but that was offset by the loss of 10 pounds of store bought potatoes that sprouted before we could eat them.

Overall, as a starting foray into the world of winter cold storage, I thought this experiment was a success. I have some areas to improve in, I had some successes and I learned a bit.

Anybody else have any lessons learned from this winter?

Parnips in the Springtime

As some of you may remember, I miss-timed the digging of my parsnips last fall. I left them in too long and the ground froze. I had heard that parsnips taste better after a winter of cold, and that most will survive without any coddling. So, I left them, and vowed to dig them up this spring and call it an experiment.

True to my word, I was out there a couple of weeks ago during a brief thaw. It didn't quite take a pickax to dig them up, but the ground was pretty icy. I dug up about half the row.

Wow. These things are huge! I broke the first couple because I'd underestimated their size. These parsnips are 14-16 inches long and a couple of them were 2 or 3 inches in diameter at their tops.

After digging and cleaning, my new worry was that they were so big and they might be tough. Well, I chopped up a couple into a soup, and that turned out really great. I chopped some into a stir fry and that was great too! A beef stew last week had some in it, also tasty. I'll go ahead and say it, SUCCESS!

This is one of those practices that traditionally supplements the cold storage of veggies. Ground storage of really hardy roots, through the winter with the intention of digging them up during the lean time of early spring. Different veggies will handle this with varying amounts of grace. Parsnips, celeriac and carrots are some of the veggies most often stored this way, but gardeners in slightly warmer climes than my zone 4, could get away with others, especially with a little bit of season extending, (think covers or mulch.) Cold hardy choices for this technique include most of the root veggies, parsnips, carrots, celeriac, beets and turnips, as well as leeks. Less hardy, but still doable, try radishes, cabbages and kale.

For those that care about such things, these were "All American" parsnips, direct seeded in early spring 2010. None were really ready for harvest in the fall. It's possible some were ready for harvest in early winter. They overwintered with absolutely no mulch or covering or anything, and came out in February tasting good. I'll harvest the last of them this month I think. (I only planted a 4 foot row of them.)

___________________________________
Blogger update: Sorry for the blog silence the past couple of weeks. The family flu had me down for a week, and put me way behind at work and at home. Things are finally calming down. Expect a small flurry of posts as I purge the backlog of Jennie-thoughts. :-)

Dried Fruit Thoughts

I dried a lot of new fruits this past summer. New to me anyway. I figured maybe some readers would be interested in how they turned out, and what we'll be doing different next year.

Apples - This one wasn't new. We dried a bag or two of crisp tasty apples. The only thing we'll do different next time is to dip them in some citrus juice to avoid the browning that occurs naturally. (Although, I think I say this every year, and every year I'm always just too stinking busy to mess with the extra step.)

Pineapples - I forget how we ended up with excess pineapple. There's a price point above which I won't buy them, and that means we usually only have a couple of pineapples a year. Must have been a fire sale or something. Because one got dried last year. It turned out really good. I'd never had any before, and they looked odd, so hubby had to push me a little to try it. I'm glad he did. I was pleasantly surprised. We dried them as chunks.


Plums - one of the new ones. I really like dried plums. Yes, they are also called prunes. Prunes just had terrible PR, and dried plums sounds much nicer. These were a wild plum. So they dried smaller and tarter than any prunes you'll ever buy. I really like them like that. Hubby has a bit more trouble with them and has demanded that we marinate them in sugar before we dry another batch. :-D


Raspberries - A neighbor has a long row of raspberries. She was nice enough to gift us several pickings from them. We ate plenty of them fresh and made a bit of jelly. There were still enough to dry a batch, so I did. They dried all crunchy and tart. I love putting them in oatmeal. I had to use the herb screens I made for the dehydrator, as once they are dry, most are small enough to fall through the wide grid of the trays. Those screens are nothing but window screen material, cut in a circle a little smaller than the trays.


Blue Berries - These are like the pineapples in that we usually only get them 1 week a year when the price drops below my limit. We eat plenty fresh for that week, but I always buy enough to dry some. Again, oatmeal and pancakes are livened up by these little gems.

To round out our supply of dried fruit, I buy large quantities of raisins and in smaller quantities I buy dried apricots and cranberries.

Besides my favorite applications in oatmeal and pancakes, there are a couple other things we do with our dried fruit.

Yummy 7 layer bars. Choc, coconut, dried fruit (chopped small), evaporated milk, all layered on a graham cracker crust. Mmmm

Stewed fruit. Or fruit compotes. This has the benefit of being a good use for both the dried fruits and the storage apples that are past their prime.

Dried fruit sampler snacks. :-) Instead of a piece of fruit for snack, we occasionally mix things up and have a cup of various dried fruits. Rowen eats raisins like there's no tomorrow, and little else. Hubby and I like the variety though. Add in some cheese chunks, and a bit of hummus with bread and you end up with a reasonably well rounded quick meal.

Hubby made some "garbage" cookies that had bits of several dried fruits in the dough.

There's a pork chop dish I occasionally cook that calls for dried apples and raisins.

Anybody have something new for me to try? :-) Chime in with a comment!

Winter Storage, let's do the numbers

Initial rate predictions:
Apples --5/week x 20 weeks = 100
Onions -- 4/week x 20 weeks = 80
Garlic -- 1 head/week x 20 weeks = 20 heads
Potatoes -- 4/week x 20 weeks = 80
Sweet Potatoes -- 2/week x 20 weeks = 40


I started the experiment on the first of November, with the goal of tracking through the end of March, so I'm 14 weeks in on the roughly 20 week challenge.

Apples, I wanted 100 to see us through, I only had 60. Of those, only 24 are left. So, we've used 40 apples in 14 weeks. Which puts our useage closer to 3 apples per week. This makes sense, I had jars of applesauce and plums and dried fruit that we've been eating on. Plus, we have been buying citrus fruits as some of our favorites come into season from FL and TX. If we keep this pace, we could last the last 6 weeks of the experiment. Usage rates aside, the apples that remain are starting to get soft and wrinkly. Dave has trouble overcoming an aversion to apples that look wrinkly. (Whether this aversion is from a lifetime of store bought apples or some wrinkly-apple-trauma in his past I don't know.) So, I might make a few apple crisps this month and use the last of the stored apples.
In lower energy times, supplementing with citrus fruits from FL and TX is not as cheap and convenient as it is today. So if I'm planning for times like that, I'll probably stick to the 5 a week rate.

Onions, this one got a little tricky to track. I buy onions by weight, but I was tracking them by numbers here. So, counting got a little tricky after the first 20 pounds of onions and there is some wiggle in these numbers because of that. I have 27 left of the original 80, so we've used 53 onions in 14 weeks. That's really close (3.8) to the 4 per week usage rates I guessed at for the beginning of this experiment. We should have enough to see us through Mid-March, which will be nice, but in reality I can't get more local onions until June or July, so I'll have to figure out what to do for the gap.

Garlic, I thought 1 head a week, which has turned out to be spot on, we've used 14 heads in the first 14 weeks of the experiment. We're eating a little more than that because of the garlic that went into jars of salsa and roasted tomato sauce. This part of the experiment is the only one that came completely out of my own garden. So, it's awesome to see it go well. I replanted the biggest and best of the bulbs this past fall. I have 10 more heads, and that should last us through the end of March. I have some garlic powder and dried garlic pieces from my favorite spice store, and I will revert to those for the 3 months between when we run out and when I can harvest the first scapes from the garden.

Sweet Potatoes, 10 of the original 25 are left, plus there's 12 left of the 20 from my southern relatives. We've used 23 in the first 14 weeks, which is about 1.5 per week. So, I was close with my usage rate guesstimate of 2 per week. We have 22 left I think, so we should last through the end of the experiment, and maybe into April if they don't rot.

Potatoes, 20 pounds left of the original 56. This part suffered the same problem as the onions. Potatoes are bought by pounds, and I'm trying to track them individually. It's not working out so well, and I quit trying with the potatoes. So, I'm going to say that my original usage rate of 4 per week is roughly equal to 2 pounds per week. (I know I know, bad engineer, let's move on.) We've used 36 pounds in 14 weeks, which is about 2.5 pounds per week. So, at that rate, our last 20 pounds should last us 8 weeks, which puts us at the end of March. This is assuming that they don't all sprout and rot, which is a very real concern, especially as we're past Imbolc now and rapidly gaining more light every day.

Losses to rot have been minimal so far, (not counting those darned carrots) with a half a dozen onions, and apples getting tossed into the worm bin. Potatoes have probably lost closer to a dozen since Nov, and will probably lose a lot more before this month is out. There are small windows in my food storage room. I thought they were small enough to not cause any problems, but it's turned out that even that small amount of light is enough to cause my potatoes to sprout. I have some heavy duty black material, I'll be making some black out curtains for those windows to avoid this problem for next year.

Squashes, this category got added a little late in the experiment, so I didn't have initial guesses at our usage rates. It turns out we are using about one a week on average. The reality of that figure is that every other week I make us a dinner with squash, and I'll use 2 squashes so that there's enough for all 3 of us to eat. The other reality to that number is we're still experimenting with squash. For one thing, I only remember eating zucchinis as a child, if Mom ever cooked winter squash, I don't remember it. So, I don't have a repertoire of recipes in my family's cooking tradition that deal with these wonderful veggies. Winter squash is cheap and good and stores well and grows really well in our area; I knew I wanted to expand our usage of it. My little family has tried a number of recipes this winter; soups, baked, roasted, sauteed. We're still not where I'd like to be, I think once a week for squash meals would be a better rate. But, until we find a recipe that we all really like, I'm still searching, and I'll be patient. Stay tuned for the Hubbard squash battle that's coming soon. :-) This thing is huge and I've been saving it for last.

Interesting information has come out of the first half of this experiment. I'm excited about what I'll learn as it winds down.


----------------------------------------Edited ----------------------------------
Hornblower brings up a good point. I should clarify the number of people this is for. 1 adult male, 1 adult female and one <2.

Winter Storage Update

We're a couple months into the Winter food storage experiment. Almost exactly halfway so I wanted to try and update on where things are at.
Things that have been nice: watching the price of onions, garlic, winter squash and potatoes climb and knowing that I don't need any, making quick meals out of cheap good supplies, watching the snow fall and knowing I don't need to go anywhere.

Meals I've been making out of our storage food
-Pasta and white sauce; this one doesn't get mentioned much, but pasta is one of those things I store a lot of. I'm trying to keep 2 months worth, (or about 25 pounds) of various types and shapes. I stock up when I find some well below the 1.20 average price per pound.
-Roasted root veggies; I've posted this one before and it's still great. With or without meat, it always gets rave reviews from the men-folk.
-Roasted Squash; just the basics, cut it in half, put it cut side down in some water and roast it for 40 minutes. I do this with acorn squash, then add butter and a little brown sugar and spices. Mmmm. Easy meal, literally 1 minute of prep, then I have 40 minutes to clean or play with Rowen, which ever seems most pressing. :-)
- Potato Soup, nothing more than stock, onions, potatoes, carrot, garlic and spices. I add in some condensed milk and cheese at the end, salt and pepper to taste. Reeeeally good.

State of the Storage
- Apples 24 left of the original 60.
- Onions 27 left, (15 pounds) of the original 80ish that I started with. (35ish pounds)
- Squashes, all 3 of the zucchinis are gone. 2 of the 6 Acorns are left , 1 of the 3 Butternuts is left. I think I still have 1 pie pumpkin left too. (I should eat that soon, it won't last much longer.) I also have that giant hubbard to do battle with. It'll probably deserve a blog post of it's own. :-D
- Carrots, as I suspected were very unhappy in my dry basement and didn't last even a couple of weeks. We did eat a dozen or so, but most became worm food.
- Garlic, 10 of the 24 remain.
- Sweet potatoes, 12 of the original 25 are left, plus my southern relatives sent us up another 20 little ones that are quite tasty.
- Red Potatoes, I think there's about 12 pounds left of the original 36 lbs. This is a guesstimate.
- Russets - 8 of the original 20 pounds remain, again an estimate.

So, with everything but sweet potatoes, I'm more than half-way through the stores. That's ok. I'll still get good information about our usage rates, and I'm learning good stuff about storage.
I'll post some of my thoughts on that as I get things organized in my own mind. I'm still crunching some numbers for the useage rates and estimated dates for "shortages." (In quotations, because I want to assure my readers, I can and will be going to the store to replenish our stocks when I run out. In past times those dates would be when shortages would start, leading into the traditionally lean time of early spring.)

Anybody else storing food this winter? How's it going?

Fresh Tomatoes in December

I love love love the veggies provided by the garden. Even though we're in zone 4, I still managed to extend my tomato season through December this year. :-)

The plants were pulled months ago, but the bag full of green tomatoes I picked on Samhain ripened beautifully (with only a 10-15% loss) and we've been eating on them for the past month. The last half dozen of those are in the fridge and will be gone in another week I bet. It's amazing to look out at the snow and ice and then eat homegrown tomatoes for dinner. Slightly shriveled and not as tasty as the ripened on the vine, they are still delicious and free.

Other veggies trickling in this month include a couple of kohlrabis and the parsnips that I'm "storing" in the ground. :-D Storing in the ground is a valid storage technique for parsnips, but really I'm just being lazy. I should dig up at least a few to have on hand for cooking and evaluation.

My cabbages didn't do so great this fall. I blame the root-bound, sad looking seedlings that I got at the local plant sale. They didn't make good heads, and they all kicked the bucket at the first frost. Total fail. I will probably try to grow my own cabbage seedlings this year. While the timing is always tricky for me, (they take a long time to grow) the quality will be worth it. Starting seedlings early enough for cabbages means I might try again with onion seedlings. I only tried those once, and when it was time to plant out all I had was onion flavored grass. :-) We'll hope for better timing this go-round. Although, really, I shouldn't put all the blame on the sub-par seedlings. My garden was a little small this year and instead of expanding, or finding another place for them, I crammed the cabbage seedlings into small nooks and crannies, and that's not the best way to treat them. I also forgot to side dress them with compost. (If I'm remembering correctly they need some mid-season love.) So, next year I'll try again. Unless we move again I imagine I'll make the garden bigger next spring, and I'll add in enough room for the cabbages to have their own row so I won't neglect them.

The cold frame is in use again this year. I found myself 4 bricks short for some reason, and sadly unable to find 4 bricks at any of the local hardware stores. (Not even at the Lowes in the big city south of us!) So, the poor thing has gaps in the construction, but I have some lettuce bravely holding it's own in there, as well as a small cabbage that's mostly just hanging out. I'm not expecting a lot from the frame this year, it's the first year this far north, and once again it's mostly in try-and-see mode. Plus, I have plans for bigger and better ones, just waiting on time/money/wood. :-D Isn't that always the truth.

Don't give up on gardening, if you're someplace with snowy-death winters. Besides the season extending tricks that can lengthen your season, winter is a great time to plan for spring's busyness.

Winter plans

The last farmers market for our small town was Weds.
I picked up one last pumpkin, a small pie-pumpkin as they are called locally. (To distinguish them from the large tough pumpkins sold for carving and decorating.) I got it cooked down Thursday evening and made it into pumpkin choc. chip cookies.
I also got some more sweet potatoes. That puts us close to what I wanted for the Winter Food Storage Challenge. Which, although technically starting in a couple of weeks, really it's already started because we're eating the food and storing the food and as of now, I'm done buying. (I think)
Hopefully this weekend I can get a final count on everything, and inventory my canned goods to see where we stand on all of it. Then with those numbers I need to create an easy to use spreadsheet to post in the kitchen to make meal planning easier.

Progress is being made on the window quilts. I have 95 out of the 125 blocks needed to cover the dining room windows. Soooo close. I can't decide if I want to try and finish those this weekend or start Rowen's Samhain costume. Or both? :-D I'm hoping I convince myself to make a simpler quilt for the living room window. Just in the name of time savings, but we'll see how this dining room one ends up before I make any decisions.

His costume isn't going to be too crazy, as it's just for a small trick-or-treat thing my office is having. So I really don't need to be spending crazy amounts of time on something that's going to get worn for an hour. Although, I do want it to be cute since my co-workers will see it. :-D And, I am thinking that if I do it right I can immediately recycle it into a window quilt for his bedroom. I wasn't originally going to make one for his room, but there's something amiss with his window, and we can't figure out if it's fixable or whether it's going to just leak all winter. Anyway, no I'm not saying what his costume is, you'll just have to check back and see! :-D

The cold frame is in use. It has a small cabbage in it and some lettuce. I need to add a layer to the brick sides this weekend so it's tall enough for the window to go on it and not smash the greens.

I have about half the garden put to bed for winter. I'm still getting the last stragglers off the tomato vines and from the potato row. Hopefully next week I'll finish with the potato harvest, pop some garlic into the vacated space and get another 1/4 of the garden put to bed.

Busy busy, lots to do. I don't even have time to take pictures of everything. Hopefully I'll get some pictures taken soon so y'all can see some of the craziness. I think my potato harvest is going to have to be seen to be believed. :-D

Winter Food Storage Experiment

Hmm... I need a catchier name than, "Winter Food Storage Experiment." Something like "Root Cellar Survival" or "The Art of Winter Storage." lol I'm open to reader submissions. :-D

So, I want to try an experiment. As such, the dates I choose are mostly arbitrary. In the past Americans would store from the end of their growing season to the beginning of the next. Most didn't choose to live in zone 4 Iowa though. :-D :-D If i was to use those dates for my experiment I'd need to go from Oct 11-April 20th. Waaay too long for my first trial run. (While searching for those growing season dates I stumbled across this tidbit: "Your frost-free growing season is around 148 days." Wow, so short. I've seen it though, the squash I planted didn't even have time to set fruit and it's already dieing back from the cold nights we had last week.)
So, since I'm going with arbitrary dates anyway, I've decided to run this experiment from Nov 1st through the end of March. 5 months, roughly 20 weeks.

I'm going to pick 5 items to stock in the root cellar and try to store enough of those things to last us through the winter. I will be trying to get storage conditions right so they'll last through March and amounts right so we don't run out too soon.

What's my goal here, some of you may be asking, what's the point? Well, as I hinted above, Americans used to do this as a matter of course. (Let's not be ethnocentric here, many peoples back to the dawn of time have done this; NOT storing winter food is the oddity, historically speaking.) Unless they lived in one of the more prosperous cities on the east coast, supplies came when the weather was good and very little moved during the winter. A family that didn't store enough or store it properly went hungry in the spring. Fast forward a hundred years and during WWII, victory gardens and canning/storing pushes were seen as a way to feed families back home and thus allow as much as possible to be sent to the troops fighting overseas. The prosperity following WWII saw much of that get pushed to the back burner. Cheap oil, the green revolution and just-in-time delivery networks encouraged Americans to trust their local grocer to have every possible fruit and veggie, fresh dairy and baked goods all year round. The danger is that grocers don't store food anymore either. It's now estimated that grocery stores carry an average of 3 days worth of food. If anything shuts down the JIT delivery network, lots of shelves will be bare, rather quickly. You've probably already seen this, ever tried to find milk and bread on the 2nd day of what's forecasted to be a 3 day blizzard? That's a localized example of the distribution network shutting down. Massive earthquake, flooding, blizzards, ice storms, etc, any of these could happen and cause trucks to halt delivery and then the clock starts ticking. On a national scale, it would take something like a flu pandemic or a massive spike in oil prices or some sort of attack either nuclear or biological. None of these are likely options, but at the same time, they are all possibilities.
My purpose with this experiment is to explore the food needs of my family over a winter. I realize that our needs will never be stable, kids grow and need more food, an empty nest will need less, but a rough idea will be more valuable than the complete question mark I have now. Knowing those food needs will allow me to store food every winter to cover any emergencies that halt the JIT delivery network. (In the summer my garden serves that role) Knowing our food needs will help me more accurately plan the crops that I grow, and help me invest in bulk food purchases with more precision and confidence. Practicing the storing, and approaching it in an intentional way means I can record successes and failures and learn more quickly from them, lessening the losses in subsequent years.

Here are my calculated-guesses for amounts I'd like to store. As this is my first year, I can only guess at our usage of these. Some guesses will be more accurate than others, but that's what this is about.

Apples --5/week x 20 weeks = 100

Onions -- 4/week x 20 weeks = 80

Garlic -- 1 head/week x 20 weeks = 20 heads

Potatoes -- 4/week x 20 weeks = 80

Sweet Potatoes -- 2/week x 20 weeks = 40


What I have stored as of today:
Apples: 51
Onions: 58
Garlic: 30 heads
Potatoes: 65 + 10 pounds of Reds + whatever I get from my red potato harvest
Sweet Potatoes: 8

So, I need another 50 apples, (wow) and another 20 onions and 30 more sweet potatoes. Apples I think are very doable, there are still good deals on new crops, onions are probably doable, we'll see. Sweet potatoes might be short, it's hard to find them, and we can certainly survive without them if we run out halfway through the experiment.

You can see the setup I'm working with in the picture above. (not bad if I do say so myself)
There's a little thermometer on the top shelf that still reads 60 degrees, and I need to work this weekend on getting some cool air flow down to that little room. Ideally the apples and potatoes need temperatures in the 30's. Ideally I need to seperate my apples and potatoes too, as the potatoes will give off a gas that will quicken the spoilage of my apples.

I also need to get all my jars of food counted and a list hung up in the kitchen for reference.

More on all of that as it progresses. Lots to do, but I'm please with the progress so far.

10# buckets of food....really?

This post is copied from an online forum where me and a few friends debate the nitty gritty of trying to start up a CSA and live in a peak oil world.
The thread began as an entreaty from one of our members for us all to go out and buy 10# buckets of storage food to prepare for the 2012 armeggedon that is currently being predicted.


It is interesting how many people are focused on 2012 as THE year for armegeddon prophesies.
The way I see it is more along the lines of give a man a fish/teach a man to fish. Yes, some food storage can see you through some of the ups and downs of the contraction that will occur. However, this contraction is going to take a LONG time. You can't possibly store enough food to keep yourself fed for the duration. A more balanced approach is to practice good storage practices and learn how to grow/raise more of your food.
Good storage practices basically boil down to -- store what you eat, eat what you store. It's all well and good to have 3 years of red wheat stored in your basement, but do you eat it? Do you know how to cook with it? Mill it and prepare it and bake it? Do you have favorite recipes with it? I try and find things that my house eats a lot of and find ways to store that item. For example, Dave and I have about 3 months worth of oatmeal and raisons in our cabinet on any given day. I use up the stored oatmeal as we eat our breakfasts and when the stores get too low, I go and buy another 3 months-ish worth. It's a food we like, we are familiar with and cook often. Plus it's like 8$ for 3 months worth and it's very healthy. The other item I store a lot of is dry beans. Every other week I make a dish out of dry beans. Chili or tacos or beans and rice, whatever. Again, it's something we like, we have favorite recipes and costs under 10$ to restock. PLUS, I know we have the spices in the cabinet to make it to our tastes.

Knowing what foods you go through quicker than others is important for storage. Sometimes the things can be correlated. For instance, since living off of stored beans and stored onions I've noticed that we [u]never[/u] fix beans without needing an onion. At a rate of about 1 onion per 2 cups dried beans. It would make life sucky if we ran out of onions before beans. But knowing it I can be aware of the onion stores and plan accordingly. These sorts of things can only be learned by actually living out of your storage. And it would suck to try and learn them after the SHTF and you're trying for the first time to live on what you've stored. I think you'll find yourself with spoiled food from things that you eat less than you thought, and gaps in essentials that you eat more than you thought. So yea, go ahead and order 10# buckets of whatever to store in your basement, just don't get to the point where you're trying to convince yourself to eat plain boiled peas on pasta for dinner because you've eaten all the pasta sauce and can't make any more with what you've stored.

Learning to grow your own stuff can help even out the yearly cycles of abundance/depletion. Again, it boils down to grow what you eat and eat what you grow. And all of the lessons that you'll only learn by trying it. This past year I grew onions, thinking I would have WAAY too many onions. And it turned out that I barely harvested enough for a half a year. I wouldn't have figured it out until we were actually trying to eat off what we grew.

These sorts of things are how I'm preparing for 2012. Do I think the world will end on 2012 in a riot of fireballs and teargas? No. But, it's a nice arbitrary goal for having a handle on my own food security needs. By starting now on the easy stuff, I can work out the kinks and identify problem areas before I have to really rely on storage skills for actual food security. I can't really do anything about the crumbling infostructure or the petroleum based food production methods that produce most of the grocery store fare. I CAN figure out how many onions I need to grow every summer so that I have enough onions to keep eating them until the next crop gets harvested. I can't really afford a 10# bucket of dry beans, but I CAN figure out how we like to eat certain beans, how they need to be prepared from dry state and how quickly we go through them. So that when I can afford to buy a bulk amount of beans I'll know how big a bucket is feasible for my family to eat through before it spoils. And I'll know how to fix them so I don't have to call my Mother-in-law and ask her what I'm doing wrong. :-P (and yes, Pat and I have had 30 minute phone conversations more than once about dried beans.)

Instead of focusing quite so much attention on stocking up for armegeddon day in Dec 2012, try and focus on the yearly cycles of abundance and depletion and learn from them so that in the aftermath of 2012 you know how to live off those 10# buckets.

Canning and planning

Processing the tomatoes was a great success. Dave and I canned 6 pints of salsa and 2 pints of delicious roasted tomato pasta sauce. Our counters are now clear of the layer of tomatoes. Hopefully we'll get some more off the vines this month, but if not I might invest in a flat of tomatoes from the farmers market, just so I can make more sauce. Oh, the sauce was SOOO good. We oven roasted 3 pounds of beefy oxheart tomatoes. I can't remember the name of the variety but it's been producing fairly well. So, we oven roasted 3 pounds, cut in half with garlic and basil and thyme (all out of my gardens) on top. Then I tossed those into a skillet with an onion and a little bell pepper, more garlic and more basil, salt and pepper. An hour later the sauce was done and soooo tasty. 3 pounds of tomatoes and an onion condensed into 2 tasty pints of garden goodness. Completely free except for the water used in the canner and the olive oil.

I'm a little worried about the salsa, it was really really watery, and I think I used too many onions. It was definitely a rainbow, I used orange and green and purple tomatoes. We had a cup full at the bottom of the pan that didn't make it into the jars, so we put it in the fridge and hopefully we'll give it a taste test tonight. *crosses fingers* It was our first attempt at salsa, so we'll see.

Now, I have probably 9 pounds of summer squash and zucchini that I have to figure out something to do with them. I'll probably try to pan fry one yellow squash tonight, but that still leaves 6 or 7. Must do research. Dave has put in a vote for some zucchini bread. :-D We'll see I guess.

Have I mentioned it's nice to be home again? With both of us pitching in, the house is slowly coming back together. The kitchen almost has all the countertops back to usable. :-) Now if I can just figure out where to store my giant canning pots I'll be set.
Next on the house list is finally getting the bedroom put together. We need to get all the clothes figured out and into a place in the closet so that we can rearrange the bed placement to facilitate a crib. :-D :-D And then we need to repair computers and put the desk area into a state of organization.
Also on the todo list before first frost is to round up window treatments for all the windows. I'm looking into plastic wrapping most of them, with some having a second buffer of a wall hanging to stop any hint of drafts. Course that demands I find a way to keep Rienne from climbing said wall hangings. :-D (Something tells me razor wire isn't baby safe.) We did really good with only running the A/C a handful of days this summer. I'm hoping we can continue the trend this winter and keep things pretty cool to save on natural gas costs. Sealing up the windows and hanging wall hangings will help, as will some nice thick wool socks. :-) We'll pile on the blankets in bed, and me and baby heater will keep Dave toasty warm.
I also need to get my cold frame moved from Boone down to the new house so I can plant some fall greens ASAP. I'm hoping this one happens this weekend. I'll plant some spinach and some lettuce and maybe kale and swiss chard. We'll see what I have in the seed trays. With any luck I'll be able to pull some tasty salad greens out in October. But, realistically they should have been planted a week or two ago, so we'll see. I might not get anything more than baby greens. :-D

Seed saving is about to go into full swing. I've got piles of mustard seed and basil seeds staring me in the face. Thanks to my love of basil I have like 3 or 4 different varieties I need to keep separate during cleaning and drying and bagging. :-P Lettuce seeds are probably ready to harvest from this spring, and green beans are getting close. Gotta save green bean seeds, I can make baby food from green beans. ;-D

Anyway. Lots to do. More pictures will be up soon.

One plus one equals three!

:-)
As most of you know, Dave and I tied the knot a month ago. The thinking was, together we are stronger than we are separately. So, we've known from the start that one plus one equals more than two, we just weren't expecting physical proof of that quite so soon. :-D
I am happy to announce Dave and I are expecting a child.
:-D
I am sadly still traveling for work, and it's very hard to be away from him and the rest of my support network right now, but the money will come in handy. If we are counting on our fingers right, we overwhelmed the birthcontrol sometime during our honeymoon and our new addition will be born at the end of March, 2009. Just in time to greet new spring plantings.

We are both really excited, and frantically trying to figure out how to make all this work. It's frustrating knowing that the most my company currently offers for maternal leave is 3 months unpaid leave. I really don't feel that's long enough for me and baby, but with me being the primary income in the family, and my student loans breathing down my neck, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to stay away from work. But, we'll figure it out I'm sure.

We're both in agreement we don't need to make this more complicated than it needs to be. I'm not sure when a new baby went from "clean out a dresser drawer for baby to sleep" to "get a bigger house, baby needs a room" but I'm not interested in following that trend. Baby can join us in our bid for austerity and living lightly and I'm positive she'll be no worse off for it. (In case you're wondering, I'm hoping for a girl, and Dave is mostly ambivalent.) We are also both in agreement that this is the only child we want to conceive. The human population needs to contract if it's to have any hope of living sustainably on this planet. That means if at some point we want another little bundle, we will seek to adopt. So, we will enjoy this experience, as poorly timed as it is. :-D We've put out the call to our respective families to help find a stash of cloth diapers and used baby clothes. I'm planning baby food into the garden for next year. And we're both really happy.

Not sure what else to write today, I've been away from the gardens for over 2 weeks now. Dave is bravely taking charge of them. We're getting lots of tomatoes and squash and beans. He's keeping up on the weigh ins and hopefully sometime soon we'll get together and I'll get this blog updated with some of those numbers. So, tune in next week for actual garden blogging and more my usual fare.

July totals and the garden handoff

Ok, time to tally things up for the month of July.

Produce pulled out of the Boone garden last week:
Stupice tomatoes: 190g
eggplant: 250g
Purple green beans: 190g
Green beans: 130 g
Pole beans: 320

Produce pulled out of the Des Moines garden last week:
Kohlrabi: 390
Basil (dried): 13g

And... Drum roll please...

July Totals
Peas: 30g
Onions: 42 onions
Bush Green Beans: 1267g
Purples: 720g
Pole Beans: 593g
Carrots: 2528g or 2.5 Kg!
Garlic: 31 harvested
Kohlrabi: 1045g
Basil: 13g
Stupice tomatoes: 190g
eggplant: 250g
Green Sage (dried): 6g
Stevia (dried): 7g

Total produce: 6649 grams, plus the onions and garlic which weren't weighed. The average garlic head should weigh around 70g and mine were all good size, so we'll run with this number for now. That adds another 2170g bringing the total to 8819 g plus onions. If I convert it all to pounds it's 19.4 pounds plus onions. I have 5-10 lbs of onions. So, 24.4-29.4 pounds of produce out of the garden for the month of July. Not too shabby. :-D

I'm pretty proud of how well the garden was planned this year. The entire North row was harvested in the space of one week. The entire center row is going to seed. The South row is all still in production. This is going to make it very easy to hand the garden off to Dave this weekend. Instead of being overwhelmed by the care of all 950 square feet, all he has to worry about is the South row.

Yes, the gardens will be in Dave's care until October. We were planning on me having very limited time to garden in the months of August and September due to my job's busy time. "Very limited" has officially been downgraded to none. Due to a team member being unable to fulfill his travel requirements, I've had to pick up his travel. I've been told I'm leaving August 11th and I shouldn't expect a day off or home time until October 1st. Super. So, Dave is in charge of tomato, eggplant, squash and pepper harvest. I know he'll do fine. I honestly don't know what I would do without him.


We went out to the Boone garden yesterday. There was some slight hail damage to some of the tomatoes and one of my two pepper plants was broken off close to the base of the plant. Sadness. But, plenty of tomatoes for harvesting. We spent time going over the row and talking about what he'll need to look for and what he'll need to do. We tied tomato vines up and harvested giant piles of mint and mustard so I can try and process them before I leave. The mint is being dried and the mustard needs the seeds gathered out of their many pods. We harvested a pile of Stupice tomatoes. I'm really pleased with this variety. It's a strain out of Czechoslovakia and has hands down won the "Early" prize for my garden this year. I want to say I have 3 vines of it in the garden, and I've pulled out over a dozen ripe tomatoes this past week. The Moonglow variety had a ripe one, and the hybrid had a couple. My squash hills finally have one fruit set. Woot. Oh and the watermelon vine I thought was dead is actually still alive. Hee hee.. not sure if it'll get it's act together in time to put on a watermelon, but there's always hope. *Still* waiting on the Romanesco Broccolis to head. These things take forever! It's supposed to be worth the wait though. If they head while I'm away and I don't get to eat any of it I'm going to be pissed. I harvested the cabbage head and the pretty purple kale. I found a recipe for a soup with Kale in it, but I don't think we'll have time to fix it before I leave, I'm planning on just drying it and powdering it to make it into a healthy additive for soups. The cabbage head I'm completely in the dark on. I still need to research whether it's better to freeze it or leave it in my root cellar.

Anyway, there's the progress report. Hopefully Dave keeps up with the tomatoes and remembers to record data on how much he harvests. If not we'll just have to make up numbers. :-D

Busy-ness

Lots of busy-ness this last week. So, this post is going to be a little long.

The onions and garlic bulbs are curing nicely. They've been in the living room for most of the curing, our weather has been too unpredictable to leave them outside while Dave and I are away at work.

I harvested the second round of green beans last week. (yes, some are purple) I have harvest totals for the week, but they are... somewhere not here. The beans were wonderful, tasty and prolific. What more can a girl ask? I was eating them straight off the vine while I was picking them. My wonderful mother came over yesterday and helped me can. Even brought a few beans from her fridge and Daddy's garden. We ended up with 4 full quarts of green beans. Not too shabby. My first canning experience went well. Except for picking the hottest day in weeks to do it. :-P We got all four burners on the stove going and that kitchen got warmish. :-P But, we survived and I learned the basics of canning. I think I'm going to practice again soon with some corn. Not out of my garden, as all my corn was a bust this spring, but fresh and local corn is relatively easy to find right now.


My Stupice tomatoes (Stupice is the variety) fulfilled their promise of earliness. I have 3 little round tomatoes from those vines. I also harvested an eggplant. I'm going to combine those into a pasta sauce tonight with some mozzarella cheese and fresh basil. Mmmm... :-D

Mustard is very close to harvestable. I'm hoping to gather the seed pods this week and take them on my business trip next week. I expect long hours in a hotel room that would be perfect for the task of opening seed pods and collecting mustard seeds. It possible I'll have lettuces seeds to do also. They are surprising me with how long they are taking to set seed. Oh well.

A couple of my container garden basils are setting seed. I didn't get much harvested from them in terms of seasoning, but the seeds will be valuable and I can possibly harvest more leaves this fall if they bounce back from the seed removal. We'll see. I'll have plenty of herbs to keep me busy. Mint has taken over my kaput corn patch. Literally knee high bushes of mint. I'm going to harvest some to make into tea. I have a really healthy Stevia plant that I'll also dry and make into a sweetener. I'll get some Thyme, green sage and a bit of chives too if I can figure out how to dry them. If I'm on my game and have a bit of luck I'll get the first round of all those harvested and started drying before I leave.

I'm starting to think I'll need to hand pollinate my squashes. Still no fruit set. Not sure what their problems is. I wonder if I put too much compost in their hills and they are soo busy putting leaves they are just uninterested in procreating. :-) Lots of male flowers, so I could harvest those and fry 'em if I wanted. Not sure I want to though. I saw someone selling squash blossoms at the farmers market Saturday. She had a shallow bin with water in the bottom and the blossoms packed in tight with their stems in the water. They looked pretty. One of these days I'll get around to frying some. I want squash first though!

I think I'll harvest my cabbage when I'm out next. It's nice and big and the outer leaves appear to be very mature. I've almost got my root cellar area finished in the basement, so hopefully it can go down there.

We are starting to get bills for the first month of utilities in the new house. Hopefully we'll sit down tonight and look them over and I'll have some usage totals for my Riot 4 Austerity pledge.

I'll end with a picture of some of my farmers market tasty goodness for the week.

Dehydration, not such a bad thing

I walked to a garage sale on my block Friday. Best thing I did all weekend! I picked up a food dehydrator for 4$! 6 trays, 100% working dehydrator!
The bag of strawberries from my Daddy's garden was still sitting in my fridge Friday, about to become an embarassing slime ball. Now they are saved. Safely dehydrated, made my kitchen smell good all weekend I might add. Since I was running the dehydrator for the strawberries and it only has one setting (ON) I figured I should put more stuff into it, so I bought a couple containers of blue berries that were 2 for 4$ and I sliced up a couple of bannanas, and the last decent peach from my counter top. Between the strawberries and the last of the peaches, I was about to have 4 pounds of trash, so I was glad to save them.
The onions went in a braid on Sunday. I was fairly happy with the result. I'm still not sure how I'm going to weigh all of these onions for my records. I'm storing them in braids, so I'm keeping the stems/leaves on, but I'm not going to eat the stem/leaves, so weighing them as a whole for my records seems not quite right. I think I'm going to just harvest them, and keep track of the number of onions I harvest, and then as I'm eating them I'll weigh the first few and average out the weight and multiply it by the number harvested. Not exact, but closer I think than any other method short of taking the tops off of every last one to weigh it properly.
So, in the interest of keeping all records in the same place...
Onions harvested: 4
They look real pretty hanging in their braid in my kitchen. Most of the braids will go in the dark basement, where they will store better, but this first one might just stay right where it's at until I eat them. :-)
I'll try and remember to take a picture tonight and post it.

Onions!

I pulled these monsters out of the ground last night. They are currently curing on my cabinet in the kitchen. That will work well enough for these 4, but not so well for the 30 more still in the ground. Research must be done to figure out the best way to deal with all these onions.

My pea and bean trellis has completely collapsed. :-( The last storm just knocked it completely over. Oh well, I'll do better next year. Luckily 2/3rds of my bean crop are bush beans and thus not dependent on something to climb.
I did harvest probably the last of the peas. 30 grams. The rest of them will be seed stock for next year.
The lettuces are bolting nicely, the romaine is about to flower, the spinach is setting seed.
The two broccoli plants that headed are already flowering. They are hybrid varieties, so it's not worth saving the seed, but I"ll let them flower just for the heck of it. The Romanesco varieties are still showing no signs of heading. They look healthy, so I'll just be patient.
My cabbage is really pretty, the head is a good 5 inches. I think it'll get bigger, so I'm letting it be.
The garlics are getting close to done. I think I might be able to harvest them the week after the handfasting. (Dave is yelling, "No gardening on our honeymoon!") hee hee So, I really need to get these onions cured and out of the way so I can cure the garlics.
I have a dozen tomatoes on the vines. :-D There's a chance a couple will be ready by the handfasting. Not sure what I'll do with them, but they'll be ready. :-)
I'm anxious about the flowers for the handfasting, some are flowering, some are not, hopefully I'll have a few nice looking ones in time. The wildflowers are doing fine. :-) There will be some flowers at least.

Mmmm, Frozen Peaches...

Dave and I froze 4 peaches last night from the bag I picked up Saturday at the Farmers Market. I got a bag of fresh Missouri peaches for 6$, 8 peaches in the bag. They are soooo good. I don't know about y'all, but when I go to the grocery store and I get a peach, they never taste like these do. They usually taste like some form of cardboard. So, I have resolved to buy 3 bags of farmers market peaches over the summer and freeze about half of what I get. So when I feel like a peach in November I won't have to settle for cardboard peaches from HyVee. I know I know, everyone reading this is like, "duh, Jennie." But, this year I'm actually making it happen. Last year I got as far as buying the peaches, but instead of freezing the extra I let them rot on the counter. :-D Baby steps.
We froze the peaches in a honey & water solution. The directions I got off the internet actually called for a sugar water solution, but Dave and I were out of sugar. So we fiddled with honey and water till it tasted about right. What we ended up with was the following.

Jennie's Frozen Peaches
4 fresh peaches
2/3 cup honey
1 cup hot water (I'm thinking I'll increase this to 1.33 cups next batch)

Mix honey and hot water together until all the honey is dissolved. Cool mixture in freezer for a couple minutes until it's room temp.
Slice peaches. I don't take the skin off of mine, but you can if you want.
Arrange peaches in 2 quart freezer bags, roughly one layer deep.
Pour half of honey water in each bag, trying to cover all the peaches.
Smooth out air bubbles and seal bag with as little air in bag as possible.
Keep flat in freezer until frozen, then stack like sheets. :-)

I've got snow peas, strawberries, peaches and rhubarb in my freezer. Last year all I had was rhubarb at this point. Definite progress. I'm excited to see how everything tastes this winter.
Tonight I should do something with the little green peas, they need to be shelled and either frozen or canned. And I need to make strawberry rhubarb jelly and can it. Then immediately clean and pack my canner so it can move down to Des Moines this weekend. :-D

This is my last weekend to move boxes, next weekend Mom and Dad come with the truck to move furniture. :-D :-D

Scapes!

After my Soggy Garlic post, I've been watching the garlic, and good thing too. The garlic scapes were out yesterday evening. With hardneck varieties of garlic, the bulb tries first to reproduce by seed. So it sends up what is called a scape, it's a long, skinny, slightly curly flower stalk. If not removed in time it can retard the bulb development. So, now I've got 303 grams of garlic scapes in my fridge. (About 2 dozen scapes) I'm planning on making a garlic scape soup tonight. It's a lot like potato and leek soup, but instead of leeks I'm using scapes. It should be delicious. You can also mince them up into scape pesto, or course chop them and use in place of green beens. They get sold up here in the farmers market for about 5$ a dozen or so. Fairly popular. Not a bad bit of money for something you have to remove in order to get garlic bulbs. :-)
Other harvests last night:
111 grams of lettuce
129 grams of snow peas

The peas immediately got blanched and frozen in two servings. I invested in a large box of freezer quart sized bags for just such things. I had been using large tupperware tubs and that worked ok for the rhubarb, but I didn't see it working as well for things like corn and peas and green beans. This freezer bag method will work well for thawing single servings of things, plus they store flat like sheets in the freezer. I plan to reuse them. Hee hee... I used to laugh at my Grandma Buckley for washing and reusing ziplocks, but I'm definitely going to do it.

I've been paying attention to my water use this week. I've noticed in particular my urge to reuse gray water. Rarely do I have something I can immediately reuse it on though. For instance, last night I had a couple of liters of gray water that had been used to wash lettuce and then boiled to blanch the peas. It was cloudy with pea nutrients and dirt, but not bad water. If I had a large enough barrel or bucket or something I could save similar batches of gray water and use it to water my container plants. The bucket would need to be easily filled by bowls and pots, so a large opening is key. Probably air circulation would be good, to keep it from going all icky. Every few months I can imagine it'll need a light cleaning with some bleach solution. I wonder if I have a bucket like that around the house.

If you are confused about this talk of gray water, let me explain. When talking about water conservation in residential applications, there are three different types of water. White water, gray water and black water. White water is either properly stored rain water or municipal/well water. Safe for human consumption, sometimes containing trace amounts of chemicals like fluoride/chlorine. Gray water is water that has been used for things like rinsing dishes, washing produce, boiling food. Gray water can also refer to water that has been used to clean things, like laundry water, shower water, dish cleaning water, but the cleansers and soaps used have to be biodegradable and non-toxic. If toxic cleansers are used or petro-based cleansers, the water usually gets classified as black water. Black water is water that isn't fit for human or plant consumption. Toilet water or water with toxic chemicals in it. If you can keep toxic chemicals out of the water, black water can be sent through a digester or a clarifier, (think septic tank or marsh) and be nicely turned into gray water.

My goal through Riot 4 Austerity is to get my personal water use to 10 gallons per day. Right now my shower uses all of that in the morning. I still need water for cooking and water for drinking and water for laundry and water for bodily functions. :-D I have a plan though.
Our new house doesn't have a shower in the main bathroom. You have to go down to the unfinished basement if you want a shower. Needless to say, I think I will not be showering much. I think my time spent in India will be put to good use here. While I was in India, water was something that was trucked in to our village. I learned to shower and wash my clothes in a 5 gallon bucket every morning. If I go back to that method, that still leaves me 5 gallons for eating, drinking, plants and bodily functions. I'll probably still go over most days, but some days it will be achievable.