Garden Garden

I do have a small veggie garden. Here is a photo of it this spring. We cut the size way down from all the past years to about half. 

What you are seeing below is the area we use for a garden. On two sides it has hot wire for the mule's pasture. The red gates are what we call a 'catch' pen. Mules are sorted there for riding or trimming. When I pick one, they all want to come.

Out in the field is a round bale feeder from the days of long ago. I still use it to put hay in during the winter to keep them from trampling on it in muddy or damp weather.

The tree line in back is my upper neighbor's pasture for her goats. Notice! NO weeds!

This photo is also just before Justin came to till the garden. 

After tilling. I planted squash, cukes, some odd flowers, and corn very late. A huge concern was the heat and dry June we were having.

July 3rd

So I'd done some watering in the evening and wrung my hands. This corn was NOT knee high by the 4th of July. To the left of the garden, I keep trimming the weeds with a scythe.

July 13th. I have free range tomatoes coming up from last year. We have had rain here and there to the tune of 3 inches at a time. 

July 22

Believe it or not, the yard was just mowed a few days ago here. Yuck, looks like I have to do this by hand today. Siera is the mule in the field. 

The corn is much taller and we have hopes for sweet corn! The cukes are just budding and so are the squash.

I had squash last year, lots of them. So many that some began to turn and I had to toss them. I rolled those mushy ones out into the pasture where about 10 plants are flowering. So, I will have more than one kind of squash.

Here is the north of our house. Nice and tidy looking. The 4 wheeler is my trash hauler, weed hauler, and fence supply hauler.

Here is the part I usually don't let anyone see. The ugly crushed garage and... piles of projects that 'were' going to get done. In the weeds rests a camper that someone was 'gonna' take apart and recycle and take the stove out and put it ... um, somewhere. It simply has sat in the weeds for many years. The garage was to be torn down and he was 'gonna' salvage 'stuff' that was in there.  

To me, it is nothing but a huge eyesore and I have looked into hiring someone to come and tear it down to the foundation and clean the area up.

There is a nice concrete pad under the garage that would make a great spot to set a tiny building on as a studio or summer guest room.

The Boss keeps telling me he will 'get to this' pretty soon. 10 years later? 

So I create my own pretty spaces where I can enjoy color and beauty and ignore the ugly as I can do nothing about it without causing a huge problem. 

My house is my castle and so are my little gardens. 
Next year, I will go back to having sunflowers a gazillion zinnias, and cosmos. I just need places to put them!

I do love gardening. I love creating pretty spaces.

Oh!

I'll catch up on the Forest Garden aka by the kids as the Secret Garden later.

Spam spam, who likes spam?

 Well certainly not me!

All comments from here on out will have to be 'approved'. Really, I am not interested in the size of your parts nor do I want to do the 'nasty' with you...whoever you may be.

But as gross as that is, why is it done? I mean really? 

Okay in other news.

Yipee! We finally got a Firestick and Remote! Very slick. Now Rich is totally unprepared. He doesn't like it. Just an off and on button and some symbols on the remote. And I showed him how to ask for Western Movies and Alexa showed us so many! 

If it were that easy, right? Teach an old dog new tricks?

It will be interesting.

So, yesterday was a pickin'/freezin'/cookin' day. 4 dozen ears of corn, blanched, frozen, and dehydrated.

Tomatoes cooked in a crock pot to make pasta sauce. Right now the tomatoes are coming in a few at a time. When I get enough to can, I will be doing that. 

Last but not least. Yesterday morning I walked to the neighbor's place to drop off a bucket of sweet cantelope. She had given me two plants for my garden and my garden is producing them like crazy whereas hers wasn't.

Share and share alike. I also picked a couple of zinnias to go with the drop off.

I am giving myself a one day break from canning/cooking/freezing. Well, I think I am. 

And to you spammer person! Ewwww! I'm glad I changed my comments again back to having to be approved. 

Last item, some art for you to appreciate. My Diversion Art:

I mean, who doesn't love unicorns???

Just stuff

 

It is Orb Spider season! Time to take a few minutes to go out and look at the weeds in the early morning hours. The Orbs are waiting for their meals and will eat their overnight catches before eating their webs and building a new web each night.

Imagine that! Rebuilding that web each night!

The past few days have been busy. Not busy like people visiting busy, or me going places busy.

I've been dehydrating vegetables and processing sweet corn for the past few days.

Did you know that you can dehydrate tomatoes? Doesn't seem like it makes any sense but you can and if you season them ahead of time, you can drop them right into soups and stews and have delicious chunks of tomato. However, the skins do show up as little chunks too. I just consider it a bit more bulk to the stew or soup.

Mornings are quite beautiful right now. The heavy morning dew makes eachnew day seem refreshing and enchanting.

Here is a view of the meadow across the fence. We used to pasture it years ago when I had more equine that we do now. It has gone to 'seed' in a way, but the weeds do provide for quite the showing of dew dropwebs.

Today I'm headed out for a couple hours of quiet at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve.

Charlie is going with. We need the peaceful time.

I still like mornings

Pre-dawn is my favorite time of the day during the summer. I like to be out just as the birds are starting their morning songs.

This morning I cajoled my Grand daughter Ariel into coming with me on an early cruise. She held Charlie and we went out to watch the most glorious part of the day.

I do love it when we have mists or fog.

It lends an air of mystic to the low spots on the ridges.

In the valley bottom on the other hand...it is dull and grey.
This was taken at one of our favorite spots at Bridge M.

The ridges were clear and the valleys were immersed in grayness.

Didn't I say that I loved foggy mornings???

This view was from Kolstad Road looking down on the ruins of an old shed.

A July misty morning is not complete without a quick stop at Linda's cropland to grab some morning shots of her oats and corn.

Last year she had soy beans in this spot. This year it is field corn....

Did we enjoy the morning in all of its glory? Yes I think we did.

Meanwhile Fall is Glorious!

A cool foggy morning. The sun begins to come over the horizon and the fog turns orange.

Fog and hills plus sunlight = amazing.

Sidie Hollow County Park on a rainy Saturday.

Under the sugar maples on a sunny afternoon.

Ridge road to the creek in *Van Gogh* style.

Even just walking up to get the mail is amazing.

The hickory tree has turned golden and will be brown in a few days.
We had over 2 inches of rain last night and everything is misty looking and very sodden.

The cloudy overcast light has a certain way of enhancing the colors. Perhaps I'll be able to get out and enjoy some more color before entering the 'brown' season.

Gardening and Dehydrating

Oh no! I didn't get dehydrated while gardening!

I got a new food dehydrator and went at it the past few days.

I tried drying herbs last year and some of those grape tomatoes. I still have some excellent dried Kale, Parsley, and onion bits from last year.
However, I used up all of the dried green peppers and basil I had.

My first experiments in dehydrating food were pretty straight forward. I didn't want to use the oven as a dryer so I'd bought a cheap dehydrator last fall. I was looking for an alternate way of preserving foods and not taking up freezer space this year as we have big ol' Black Bart just about ready for 'market'.

Here is the new dehydrator just after I filled up two trays with green beans and two trays with green peppers.

Here is the one tray of green beans after dehydrating.

I vacuum sealed the green beans and stored them away. Even I was amazed at how small these whole meals of beans were reduced to. However, I will more than likely use the frozen ones to go with a regular meal and the dried ones in soups and stews this winter.

Rich and I picked some of the 'wild' apples from the meadow. I found a recipe on line for cinnamon and sugar dried apples. I sliced the apples thinly and didn't bother with peeling them. I dipped them in some vinegar water [which works just like lemon juice to preserve the apple's color] sprinkled them with cinnamon and sugar, and then placed them in the dehydrator.

OHH how delicious! It is like having apple pie in your hand!

Shown also are the green peppers and onions. I will grind the onions into onion powder for a spice after I am done drying the rest of the onions.

So while I was letting the dehydrator work its magic, I went out to work on my east flower garden.
Last year it looked like this...

And now?

It is coming along!
[ I may change the shape to make it easier to mow around in the future. ]

Compared to how it looked when I started. Whew...

I put the finishing touches on it and stood back recalling what the pile of bricks, drywall, and nails looked like. The ugly eyesore on the east side of the house. Then I smiled and did a little happy dance.

I have the rest of this side of the house to finish, but that will wait until next year. I have some plants to transplant from a few friend's gardens that will go well with what I have now.
I do love my marigolds in containers, especially the ones in old maple sap buckets.
They are easy to move around. Just pick up the handle and go!
Instant rearranging is so much fun.

I heard my husband tell his daughter "She is out there playing with her buckets again, moving stuff around!"

Saturday was another busy day. We went to a farm in Genoa to get a truckload of hay and spent quite a while visiting. I went with the farmer's wife to admire her gorgeous vegetable garden. We talked plants, gardens, flowers, freezing veggies, and safflower.
I told her about my experimenting with dehydrating and had brought some samples of my dried apples. They all loved them.

We left with our load of hay, a huge bag of sweet corn and safflower petals to dry.

Safflower is the poor person's saffron. I spread this out on the counter overnight.

Then I went to work on processing the corn. I blanched and vaccum sealed about 8 bags for the freezer.

Farmer's wife wanted some lemon basil.
So...instead of running the dehydrator for just two trays of herbs, I decided to see how corn dehydrated.

Well? I bet you are wondering how this all turned out?

I'd call it a success!
My next step is to put a portion of green beans in with the corn and some peppers along with some spices in a vaccum sealed bag and label it 'soup stuff'. I could just grab a package and toss it in a beef broth.

Next up. Apples. More apples!
The cheapskate in me doesn't want to waste all of those superb wild apples growing in the meadow.