What did you grow or can this year?

a reply to: GBP/JPY

I hope it was 98 vintage aloha white widow!
Man I miss that stuff.

a reply to: seagull

You won't believe this...when I was stationed at Camp Pendleton USMC, they would serve fried rabbit for chow once a week. Rabbits were everywhere. My wife would have the biggest problem with cute lil bunny wabbits when it came time for supper. Remember, we have just relocated to the country. OK..longer than I thought being exactly 24 months now.

You gave me an idea. I could make another garden plot next to the original one and reciprocate the plots every other year. This gives the soil time to refresh? It took me awhile to get used to the tiller and now I can grind the land like a pro. I bought a 4'x8' trailer and can go out in the fields near us to collect cow fertilizer. Also have permission to cut firewood.

The biggest expense moving to the country was purchasing all the tools & equipment needed to care for the property. I didn't even have a shovel when we moved here. Now thousands of dollars later, we have it all. JD tractor, chainsaws, tillers, rakes, hoes, etc...

Country living isn't for the weak. My wife is amazed by all the things I've done including renovating this 1800 SF house. She has toughened up a bit as well. It's hard work and so rewarding. I'm rambling...sorry. The subject is very interesting and I have a million questions.

a reply to: CADpro
I'm interested in Seagull has to say, but I just move stuff around every year. One year the corn is on the far right, next year maybe middle or far left, depending on if I need shade for the lettuce. I do the chicken poo every year over winter, because it breaks down well with all the rain, snow, freezing we get up here.


Oh, and for anyone who plants lots of tomatoes? I love this method. Works so much better than cages. I've had them get over 6 feet tall, weaving them through it. Cattle panels

We did tobacco , potatoes , carrots , runner beans , spinach , tomatoes , brocolli , courgettes , sweetcorn , squashes, and took apples, pears , blackberries , yewberries , hazelnuts , beechnuts, walnuts and hops . Hand to mouth stuff , no canning , but we're still eating . Dried some apples on thin wire in the fireplace.
Just made another apple pie with custard , (so much better than shop bought , they're tight with the apple), and bagged another spare salt to the back of the larder. When 6 good apples is a couple of quid we've been cleaning up . An old variety pear tree in a hundred year plus abandoned grove in the woods, giving thick skinned delicious clean pears has supplied us with plenty of easily stored fresh fruit .
Layed up a lot of leek seeds and perpetual spinach seeds , those are easy to get just-in-casers , and we always avoid f1s where possible

a reply to: CADpro

That'll work, too, I should think. Our ground wasn't so much ill-suited as it was polluted, and just needed to have natures little cleaners to the job--worms, bugs, etc...--planting ground cover, and the fertilizer helped that process.

Yours, I think, would just need the nutrient additions. So I think your idea would work out very well. At the end of your growing season, just till it all under, and the next season should be even better. You definitely need to rotate, as different plants will use different nutrients, giving the soil a chance to recover.

Rabbit is good food. I grew up eating wild rabbit, and later home raised. We'd get the rabbit while out bird hunting. Bird shot will do for rabbit, too.

Wow it’s really that simple I’ve always been intimidated to try it for fear of giving myself poisoning, but I always eat others home made pickled goods.

a reply to: chiefsmom

a reply to: Athetos

It really is, you just have to always use the time for meat, for anything with meat in it. 90 Min for Quarts, 70 for pints, from the start of the weight jiggling, or pressure reached. My Pressure cookers both have the jiggler weights. I like them better, because if you have to be in another room for a minute, you can still hear it.

And I always add at least 4 inches of water to the empty pressure cooker before adding the jars. Never want a cooker to blow from lack of water!

a reply to: Athetos

No, it's not really all that hard. You do have to make sure you do it right...poisoning yourself isn't good. Time, as chiefsmom said, is key. , and enough water in the pressure cooker--speaking from experience...

Jars are fairly easy to come by. Yard sales, rummage sales, flea markets, and of course, places like Wal-mart. My sister found about 100 jars at a crafts fair a few years back...about half of 'em weren't any good, but for 2 dollars, she got 40 plus jars that were perfectly sound, and old.

a reply to: chiefsmom
We managed to fill a big commercial cabinet (old, old thing with real wood shelves that are an inch thick) with tomato and pepper products for the winter. The kids planted nearly 50 tomato plants and half that many peppers this year in addition to cukes, beans, melons and the rest of the usual garden stuff. I took care of the onions, garlic, potatoes and herbs. Neither the onions nor the potatoes did as well as they've done in the past but I had enough onions to do up lots of pasta sauce. The small ones I freeze in little baggies to use for stew. Same with the small potatoes when they're dug.

Strawberry crop wasn't the best. I did manage to get a couple of quarts in the freezer this year from my patch and bought a few at the Farmers' Market to supplement. Early frost got my peaches so nada there.

I put out some late tomatoes and peppers so I'm still harvesting them and expect to be doing so until about Thanksgiving if we don't have a hard freeze. A friend called yesterday to say he'll have about a bushel of Romas this week so I'll be off to pick them up. Never pass up free food and one can never have too much tomato sauce.

Still have beets and carrots in the ground and will be planting up next year's garlic patch in a couple of weeks. If I can keep the deer out of the beet patch I should be able to harvest them throughout the winter. We will pull the carrots before the freeze sets in because if we leave them in the ground the wireworms tend to get to them. We just chop up and freeze them for soups and stews if they look like they won't last in storage.

Looking forward to the pecan crop this year---with our rainy summer it looks like a bumper crop this year!

My kids have finally (in their early 40s now) realized the great satisfaction of seeing their work in the gardens fill up the cabinets. There's even more satisfaction in seeing the grocery bills go down substantially since they are in their first year of running their own business and having to adjust their budget as business goes up and down. They had always gardened to some extent but never made the time and effort to preserve much. Son-in-law, having tasted the home-canned peppers will absolutely not eat a commercially canned pepper now. In addition to canning them we also freeze a lot of the peppers for use in stews, soups and casseroles. I dice or slice them up, spread them on a cookie sheet and freeze then dump them into zip-lock bags. One shelf of the freezer is filled with them now. When the weather gets a little cooler we'll be roasting the late ones on the grill before sticking them into the freezer. Same with a lot of the late tomatoes. Great for chili.

a reply to: gimcrackery

Missed this.

Wrong. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to get the ground ready. But people grow gardens, and flower beds all over the place with little problem, other than the work involved.

Green houses are a good idea if you live further north, my Dad built a small one (15' x 15') when I was in high school. As long as you keep it reasonably warm, you can grow year 'round--course hand pollination is a pain in the ass.

a reply to: seagull

Yeah, for what they are going for in the stores, your sister did great. Seems like they go up a bit every year.
I got lucky a few times, talking to neighbors and family. Hubby's mom didn't want to can anymore and gave me a bunch, so did our elderly neighbor.

I do have a bunch from my grandmother, but they are the old blue and green, and I can't bring myself to can with them. But I use them on the counter for macaroni and rice and stuff.

a reply to: diggindirt

Wow!
I only tried a spaghetti sauce once, and hated the taste, but I would love to try it again if I could find a good recipe. Got one? LOL

I do make a chili/goulash starter with tomatoes, peppers, onion and garlic. That cans up easy enough and tastes good.

a reply to: chiefsmom

Hers are old Atlas jars, everything is packed away right now. But we're looking for places with either old orchards, because I prefer the old fruit trees to the newer ones. The fruit is thicker skinned most of the time, and just plain tastes better, too.

But, I'll plant fruit trees as necessary. Apple. Peach. Pear. and plum. I'm a little worried about planting black berries as they might get away from me...but if I can find 'em wild, I won't need to...and since they're everywhere, that shouldn't be too hard.

Some stuff we do every year because we know we'll go through it

Pickled pickles from our own cucumbers
sauerkraut made with red kraut, little green apples and carrot slices fermented into it.
Strawberry jam, blackberry jam, blueberry pie filling from www.pickyourown.com farms in our area
Tons of green beans--the only vegetable my little kids will eat, and then only if from our garden.
I try to bank carrots and potatoes. But its and art and I kind of suck at it.

Then there are some specialty projects.

The only soda pop we allow in the house is ginger ale that we make ourselves. For the first 72 hours, bread yeast just makes carbonation in the soda. After hour 72, it starts making adult beverage. We put it in the fridge to kill the yeast. It's great for children who are sick at their stomachs---completely different from store bought, which is made with con syrup.

I have found some heritage persimmons in the neighborhood, and I'm waiting for the first frost. The cold turns all the acids into sugars....

Then there's the food preservation that isn't technically canning, but is involved with our prepping cycle.
-parched corn to eat while hiking and hunting
-venison, elk jerky
-processing our chickens, freezing the carcasses and saving the bones for soup stock


about your garden soil:
Another poster mentioned cow poop and tiling into the garden. Most animal poop is WAY to rich in nitrogen, or "hot", to put in the ground right before crops.

We have a barrel type composter for kitchen compost (especially coffee grounds and banana peels). We mix it 50/50 with bedding straw, and put it one heap, for our 'hottest' fertilizer--generally spices, herbs, and green beans that need all the nitrogen.

We have another pile of chicken-coop straw that we let cook down for a season before gardening with it.

We have a third pile of horse poop and alpaca poop that we let cook down for 2 years before putting it on food crops.

We mix all of these with our lifeless sand of a topsoil. For carrots we only use half as much fertilizer, because carrots grows horizontal "hairs" (rootlets) when dosed with too much nitrogen.

We also use a chicken tractor. Chickens are actually insectivores rather than gramnIvores; they mostly eat grain because humans feed it to them. But the best way to de-bug a future garden site it to move a chicken tractor across it. When it's warm and buggy, they don't need any commercial food at all. Just vegetable scraps and whatever they can catch!

Grew a lot of peppers. Bell peppers, Reapers, Jolokias, 7pot, a couple Trinidad, we did snap peas, pumpkins (white and orange) carrots, garlic chives, onion chives, and I have a lemon and orange tree that I'll bring inside soon as I live in zone 6/7. I'd like to bring them all inside but I don't think we have the room for that.

Honestly I never thought I'd want to live outside of the suburbs until we started growing some of our own food. Now I wish I had more space.

-Alee

a reply to: tovenar

sauerkraut made with red kraut, little green apples and carrot slices fermented into it.

Ok, last year I used red cabbage, and it does look neat, being pink in the jar. But I am really curious about the Green apples and carrots. Why? How much, how thinly sliced? Do you leave them when canning? (or eating)

a reply to: NerdGoddess

I'm in Zone 5, but I have always wanted a lemon tree. Don't they get too big to bring inside? Do you cut it down? Very curious to hear from someone that does it.

originally posted by: chiefsmom
a reply to: Justoneman

Yeah, I had a few mishaps with my dang chickens. I really wanted to put just my ducks in the garden this year, but couldn't get them to go through the gate, without several chickens getting in, so I gave up. I had some monster tomato worms that made them very happen when I found them.
Gross!

i had some worms too. One of them looked like a small plant with tiny flowers I didn't recognize it and didn't carry it in to work for the Biologists to have a nerd fest with.

originally posted by: CADpro
a reply to: chiefsmom

Take life-long city slickers then relocate em in the country. This is us...lol.

Anyway, our garden soil doesn't look as healthy as it did last year. We have sandy soil here. The soil looks like it needs organics or something mixed in to be more of a dirt. Dirty-dirt...lol

Our neighbor own acres of land with cattle and wonder if I should go get a trailer load of poop and mix it in now for next season?

Yes on cow manure. Get some Chicken poop too. Guiana from birds is the best but some plants, like blueberries, hate fertilizer.

a reply to: chiefsmom

I had some injuries and other health issues this year,didn't get to can much.
I was able to can blueberry jelly,strawberry jam and apple butter.