Happy Vegetables - or are they fruits?

So last night I could no longer put off harvesting two of my tomatoes as they were a beautiful, bright red which meant they were calling to me "PICK ME NOW! TURN ME INTO GUACAMOLE WITH A NICE AVOCADO!"

They are loud tomatoes. It's the red.

So I picked two of them and a large cucumber. I was hoping to extend my cucumber picking a little longer but this one was good sized and it looked like my cucumber plant was struggling to grow others while providing for this monster.



That is TOTALLY not an upside down happy face that I can't figure out how to fix.

Okay maybe it is. I put the quarter there in the middle for the "nose" to give you an idea of size. I think I did pretty good overall.

Something about sun ripened, on the vine tomatoes smells so earthy and wonderful.

And now I need an avocado.

Locally Grown

I was driving to work this morning listening to my local NPR station which has a Friday segment called backyard farmers. It's one of my favorite programs and one of the main reasons I tune in Friday mornings.

On the way in they talked today about In Season Market which goes beyond, in my opinion. what other local grown vendors do and source their food from no more than 250 miles away. So sometimes they dont have a lot of stuff around although it seems like they are getting more and more stuff week.

They work with local vendors and most of their vendors are found word of mouth. On the NPR program they talked about a lot of their vendors just meeting them at their exits off I-25 to pick up the food for the market.

I'm excited about this store because it shows a lot of what can be provided locally which to me is more important than "organic" because often organic is a buzz word and organic produce from Mexico (or where ever else) still had to burn a lot of oil and energy as well as cause/be a product of question work practices just to get to my table.

Also, food delivery, which is convienent if you can't go to them.

I'm excited about raspberries and beef (not together though). I wanted to plant raspberry bushes this year and it just didn't happen. I also want to buy a whole grass fed cow and store it in my freezer but that is going to take a lot of time and saving to make that happen. In the meantime I can get both at this local store.

I'm putting together a shopping list now for this weekend. At the very least I'd like to get some beef and chicken for dinner next week and maybe some raspberries for canning.

Checking in...

I was on vacation for a few days in Alaska with my husband, showing him the sites etc. For me it was a homecoming since I was born and raised in AK. For my first few years we lived out on a cabin in Wrangle-St. Elias National Forest and then later moved to Anchorage (the big city) when I was about 5.

We had a fantastic time and I'll probably post pictures in the next few days.

Something that really stuck out to me though was the temperature difference. Alaska is having a wet summer which happens since it's in the Pacific Northwest and so it's wet and cold this summer. No big deal really except for the first time I really paid attention to how things were growing.

My uncles lettuces were doing great and were colorful and full. But his tomatoes had essentially curled into a ball and while they weren't officially playing dead I would be surprised if they did anything productive in terms of fruit this year.

We stayed at a B&B whose focus was on sustainability (Berry Patch B&B in Seward, AK). She mentioned that her strawberries weren't really coming up and that her crab apple and cherry trees hadn't really flowered this year. She was predicting a less than fruitful season.

That makes me think on climate change and how a true ice age would really affect human food sources. Right now it's almost 100 in Colorado. It's in the high 50's to 60's in AK. My tomatoes are really starting to come in but I have to water almost twice a day to keep my plant from wilting. My uncle will be lucky to get A tomato.

On the other hand I was really surprised at how much actual knowledge about edibles in AK I had. Being raised the way I was for a number of years I was able to talk about wild rhubarb, crow berries, lignonberries, wild raspberries, where we used to pick wild blueberries and even about how Alaskan Roses can be used in a variety of ways from a shot of vitamin C to turning the blossoms into jam etc. I wish I had that knowledge for the place I live now.

It did make me want to purchase a wild edibles book for Colorado. While I am all about stocking up water and some food for a long term storage plan that is not an end all/be all for when the SHTF. While that may last a few days or weeks or even months if I get silly with it, ultimately, knowing what to eat and how to eat it is going to be far more valuable.

Strawberry Jam

When I was going to school and bringing my lunch I often brought a peanut butter and crabapple jelly sandwich. Our landlord, every year, gave us several jars of the stuff and I liked it. My mom went through a phase where she took a personal sabbatical and stayed home while I was in junior high so even something so small as free jelly was one less expense she had to worry about.

While my mother canned many, many, things one of the things I have no memory of her making was jam or jelly. She did pickles. She did green beans. She did spaghetti sauce. But no sweets, no jam or jelly.

With our PYO strawberries (and an assist by organic strawberries from the farmers market because I didn't QUITE have enough) I was able to make strawberry jam.

I had intended to make it with pectin as the Ball recipe gave but found out at 11pm at night that I didn't have lemon juice which was apparently vital to the process. So my choice was to dump the entire vat or find a recipe that didn't deal with pectin. I went with the alternate recipe and so my strawberry jam is VERY sweet, took a LONG time to boil down and tastes just like homemade. Literally.

I was able to can 9 8oz jars of it and have put it away in the "cold cellar" of my basement storage area under the stairs. It's thick, clumpy and delicious.

I'm debating now if I should make more from a different berry, say raspberry when the PYO has those, if I should get some cherries from the farmers market or possibly be REALLY brave and hold out for peaches later this summer. Or scrap it and say "I have 9" and be done with it.

Luckily it's not a decision I need to make at this moment but I have to tell you, that feeling of accomplishment is something I don't think I can beat any time soon.

Berries

Alternatively titled: Thank goodness I'm not a migrant worker

Saturday I took my 5 year old, my mother in law and myself to a Pick Your Own strawberry farm about 30-45 minutes from our house.

The berries were, of course, pick your own and $2.60 a pound.

I spent about an hour and a half out there picking, with help of course, and can't help but think, what a very middle class thing to be doing. To be paying for the privilege of picking my own berries when out in the world, the strawberries in my grocery store could very well (and probably were) picked by Mexican migrant workers.

My back ached and I got sunburned and I was only out there for 90 minutes max. I was hot, sweaty and at the end a little light headed. I honestly said, out loud, "Thank God I don't have to do that for a living."

While we were out there we did meet a toadally sweet Toad who was working very hard in the fields as well catching bugs.



The place we went was certified organic which I didn't know until we were there. It was nice but I gotta say, it looks like they need more toads. A lot of the berries had been dined on by bugs and so it was a lot harder to pick than I initially anticipated.

The berries were small, much smaller than what you get at your local grocery store and that of course was expected.

In the end our 90 minutes of not so much constant picking yielded about 4 lbs of strawberries.


More importantly we had a good time and at least for me, it really highlighted how much work we DON'T do to provide the food that we consume.

I'll detail later what I did with the strawberries because I'm pretty proud of it both because I picked the berries by hand and also because it was my first experiment.

Fail fail fail

So after getting the basement closet MOSTLY cleaned out I have STILL not managed to purchase the water needed to go into it. It's depressing.

I also have not made much headway on the landscaping in front of the house. Also depressing. It's been oppressively hot and that, coupled with the fact that I was studying for my professional certification exam have put me behind schedule everywhere.

This weekend the plan is to go to a PYO strawberry farm and attempt to pick, well, strawberries, if they haven't been cleaned out yet. I'm hoping to make some strawberry jam this summer and it would be great if I could manage it from a PYO since my strawberries seem to have stopped bearing.

My tomatoes however are setting fruit nicely and at least one Roma plant has 4 small green lumps forming. It continues to do better than my Topsy Turvy tomato plant.

My pea plant, the last survivor, has been slowly decimated by an unseen pest. I did manage to find a lone green caterpillar last week and moved it off the pea plant but yesterday discovered what appeared to be a discarded cocoon between some leaves so either he came back or his sibling was still there and I never found them. I harvested 7 pea pods yesterday but I think I may have left them too long on the plant to actually BE edible. I'm trying to leave a few pods on there to seed save for next year and my understanding is that they need to dry completely on the vine.

Cucumbers have SHOT up in the last week and while I still do not see any flowers I am starting to see a bunch of new growth and tendrils. The onions are still not large, not much larger than the sets I started with, as best I can tell, but their stalks are starting to fall over. Not sure why but I will leave them in the ground as long as I can.

So there is my update.

We plan to set up a raised bed next year for me. While I love my containers, if I am to grow any real quantity of anything I need more room and currently I wont get that from my containers. So I think next year we will do maybe an 8ft x 4 ft raised bed to accommodate those items that I want a quantity of such as the peas, tomatoes and cucumbers. I can also see re purposing the containers to grow more items but not having to combine multiple plants into the same container like I tried this year. Specifically I can see potatoes in my future with one of my containers.

I will say that while it is only late June I still feel like I have learned so much about plants and gardens already.

Continuing with goals

I finally have the majority of the under-the-stairs closet cleared out and am ready to start putting STUFF into it.

My goal is to put the water in there to start and also our BOB's when I get those together. After that work on the pantry aspect of it.

I found a variety of items, many of which made their way to the Goodwill near my mother in laws house.

There is one thing that I found a little disturbing though, as she attempted to help me clean out the closet.

I have a LOT of paint in there. There will be a hazardous waste cleanup in our area in September so for the time being I'm just moving the paint to the garage. But my sweet mother in law kept telling me to keep this paint and keep that paint because you never know....

She's not a hoarder but that is certainly the mentality.

In any case, the paint is going. And soon.

I am pretty excited to be setting up my first official "Storage" area in the house and readying it for "prep". I'll show pictures when I finally have something to show.