Flaming Hot Pineapple Jam!

I just had to share.....Matthew made his very first jam tonight!  I'm so proud!  Matthew being the chili-head that he is decided on an ULTRA hot pineapple jam.  It has some of the hottest peppers in the world in it...Ghost, Fatalii, Caribbean Red Habanero, Lemon Drop, and Red Cap Mushroom Peppers.  So hot but man...SO GOOD!  They blend so well with the sweet pineapple.  It also has some sweet onion, lime juice, and brown sugar.  We're going to be bringing this to market for those who have a brave palate.  It's certainly not for the faint of heart, but I know there are plenty of people out there who love their heat.  We'll see which one Matthew decides to make next!

Pineapple and Hot Pepper Jam

It's like he's been canning for years.:)

Summer Honey and Bee Clean Up

Hello!  It seems to be taking me more and more time these days to keep up with getting postings up on this blog.  I'm sorry!  Things here have been slowing down a bit farm-wise, only to be replaced with getting everything ready for basically the imminent arrival of Baby 3!  Yeah...I'm kind of just waiting.  Even though I have two other little children and I basically know what to expect, I still feel like I'm just not ready.  Oh well!!  We're very excited and Willow and Ronan are anxious for the new arrival.  Tick tock...
Summer honey is in!  Well, it's been in for a few weeks now but like I said, I've been a bit behind.  Sorry!  It's a really nice batch this year.  Very bright yellow with a crisp, almost sharp taste to it.  I don't mean that in a bad way either.  This time around we started to extract the honey right as the sun was going down.  We don't have an enclosed honey house and if we tried to extract during the daylight hours we would be surrounded by a giant swarm of bees.  They catch scent of the wonderful honey, go back to the hive and signal that they've found a nice food supply, and before too long they're bringing all their friends from home to help suck it up and take it back to the hive!  Now, needless to say this is not very condusive to a smooth extracting session.  Once the sun goes down the bees have gone home to their hives for the night and we can extract without having them surround us!  Here is the most recent honey flowing out of the honey extractor into one of the 5 gallon buckets.  Yum...

And on another note, we had someone ask us what we do with the boxes of frames once the honey has been extracted from them.  Well, one option is to simply put them right back on the hives.  Let the bees start working on putting more honey in them right away.  When we pull the boxes off of our hives we replace them with empty frames right at that moment so the hives are never without a honey super (the box the honey frames are in).  Sooo, when we extract we place the empties boxes close to the hives for the bees to clean.  Again, they catch the scent of that yummy honey and before long the boxes are swarming with bees cleaning out every drop of leftover honey to take home.  This works out for us because we eventually get to get that honey back the next time we extract.  It simply goes back to the hive.  I actually got a short video of the bees cleaning out the boxes the last time we extracted a few weeks ago.  This was the next morning.  It's quite a sight to see.  Oh, and yes.....you do hear my sheep in the background!

 

Potatoes are in!

I can finally give an update to my potato post from May!  Well folks, we have potatoes.  I can actually say that the potato sacks that I experimented with this year did work and I got more potatoes than I normally get when I plant them out in the garden.  Now I will sat that the overall output wasn't great, but I know this was due to the horrible drought.  I mean, I can only water so much!!

The potato plants had fallen over and started to dry up.  It was time to unearth any potatoes in the bags.

Purple, red, yellow, and white...a nice little potato harvest.

Some nice white potatoes!!

I'll probably use these bags again next year.  I'm just going to hold my breath and hope we get more rain!  

Time to can....

I spent all day yesterday canning tomato sauce from the abundance of heirloom tomatoes that we've had  this year.  Despite the drought and thanks to sprinkler irrigation, we've had a nice bumper crop of tomatoes.  I had started a lot of canning tomatoes from seed this year so I would have plenty to can.  I'll have more paste tomatoes to can yet too as they ripen up.  If there is one item our family uses through the cold months it's tomatoes.  I've already gotten green beans in the freezer and I hope to have a few more items to get stocked up for the upcoming winter.  I've been feeling the pressure to save as much food as possible this year since the current rumblings are saying that food prices are going to be out of the 'Verse next year due to the drought we've had this year.  If you are in a position to save food for yourself and your family, I would do it.  You don't have to go through the effort of canning if you don't want to.  So many things freeze so very well.  I actually prefer to freeze sweet corn over canning it as I think the flavor and texture is so much better! In all seriousness though, save what you can to ease your financial burden in the relatively near future.  I wish we were ready to get the cow we're wanting to get simply because I know the price of GOOD milk is going to be crazy.  With two little children and a third on the way we go through unreal amounts of milk in this house!  We actually sat down and did the math...it would be cheaper in the long run for us to buy the cow, her feed, and hay than to buy milk for the year!  Crazy.  Anyways!  Here are the pictures from yesterdays marathon canning.  And on a final note...canning all day in a hot kitchen when you're 35 weeks pregnant is NOT fun!!

Lovely Italian heirlooms for canning.  This basin weighed about 30 pounds just to give you an idea.   There was more where that came from too!

Another basin full of other pretty tomatoes.   Some of these got thrown in the canning pot, but many were saved for other tasty applications. 

One 11 quart stockpot full of tomatoes ready to be cooked down before going through the mill to remove the seeds and the skins.  I had to repeat this process MANY times.

The finished project fresh out of the canner.  This tomato sauce will come in very handy on many cold winter evenings  as a good base for a nice hot pot of soup.  It's a lot of work, but it's worth it in my eyes.

Dandelion Wine - Part Two

So it was time to rack the Dandelion Wine this week!  Hard to believe two months has gone by already!  I just wanted to post a couple pictures of how it's looking.  It has REALLY cleared up a lot.  In the second picture you can see my hand through the wine.  So it got racked into another clean carbouy and another crushed Campden Tablet was added.  It should continue to fall even more clear as time ticks on and more sediment falls to the bottom.  I'll be racking the wine again in two more months...Keep an eye out!!

It's Tomato Time!!

Hello everyone!  It's been way too long since we got a post up here.  Please believe me when I say we've been quite busy around here.  Children, market commitments, garden work.  Oh, and did I mention that being 8 months pregnant in the summer heat wears you out?!  Anyways....We have heirloom tomatoes now!!!  I am so excited.  Every year we wait and wait for the middle of summer to arrive here at our house because that means we don't have to buy the cardboard-like ones from the store anymore!!  Here is a large basin of them I brought in a couple days ago.  These were the first of the season!  And since we do only grow heirloom there are many colors, sizes, and shapes. 

Here is what may be my all-time favorite tomato...the Black Pineapple or Ananas Noir.  It may not be the prettiest of tomatoes, but the flavor and texture are unbelievable.  When you slice into it it has this pretty assortment of green, red, and almost purple stripes.  This is the fourth year I've grown this tomato and I intend to for now on.

This is a Green Pineapple.  It is in fact green when ripe.  It does gain a slightly yellow tinge once it's ready to come off the vine.  It's a nice little trick to know.  It's almost neon green on the inside and so sweet with a nice amount of tang.....a real keeper.

The tomato on the right is a Costoluto Genovese and the tomato on the left is a Japanese Black Trifele.  The JBT is slightly pear shaped and more of a purple/brownish color.  Like so many of the purple family tomatoes is has a wonderful deep, smoky, wine like taste almost.  So very good.

These are just few of the many tomatoes we'll have this year.  We even have white tomatoes...yes white!!  Come see us at the Grandview Farmers Market over the next weeks for some of these beauties.  Take care everyone!

Potatoes Part One

I decided to give potatoes another go this year.  I never seem to have much luck growing them despite soil amendments, growing techniques, etc.  I always ended up with hardly any potatoes that were small and just not that great.  This year I decided to try to grow them in large fabric-like bags specifically designed for growing potatoes.  They are the Jumbo Potato Bags from Gardener's Supply Company. The reviews were quite good and apparently people get nice potatoes out of these things!  So off I went to get some good organic fertilizer, soil to fill the bags, and of course my seed potatoes.  I decided to grow four varieties this year, Kathadin (white), Red Pontiac (redskin), Yukon Gem (yellow), and Purple Majesty (purple-skinned).  The idea of these bags is you start by putting about 4 inches of your soil into the bags along with about a cup of fertilizer.  The sides of the bags have been folded down half way and as the potatoes grow they get unfolded.  They're made out of this polyester felt-like material that allows for water drainage and soil aeration.  I got them in blue...my favorite color.  Here is the soil/fertilizer mix.  I used a good quality top soil/compost/peat mixture I mixed myself.

I just mixed all this together and smoothed it out.  Then I put all the seed potatoes in the bags.  Think about if you've left a bag of potatoes from the store in the cupboard for too long.  You come back to them eventually and they've all sprouted.  Well, these are now seed potatoes and you could plant those for new potatoes a few months later if you wanted to!  Here is my very dirty hand holding one on the Purple Majesties.  Even the sprouts on it are purple!

So, I got all the potatoes arranged in the soil so they weren't too close to each other.  Here you can see what they looked like before I covered them with the next layer of soil.

The potatoes at this point were ready to be covered with another 4 inches of soil.  Again some organic fertilizer was mixed in.  Potatoes like to feed!  Not too much nitrogen though.  You'll get a lot of green leafy growth, but you won't get too many potatoes.  The instructions that came with the growing bags said that for every eight inches of leafy growth add four more inches of soil until you've filled the bags with soil.  So that's what I did until the bags were full!  The potatoes poked their leaves out of the soil within a few days and they've just grown at warp-speed since then.  I should add that I got them planted back on May 14.  They finally seem to have leveled out now here that it's July as they're putting all their energy into growing new potatoes.  Or that's what SHOULD be happening!  Here they are a couple days ago.

Once the tops have basically died down it'll be time to dump out the bags and unearth what I'm hoping will be a lot of nice colorful potatoes!  Obviously I'll be sure to get pictures and let everyone know how this experiment in potato growing goes.  Keep your fingers crossed for me!