Wheat and Barley

My husband is interested in growing our own grain. At the beginning of the planting season, I didn't seem to have the time or brain cells to look into this one.
But as we continue to grow/process/eat locally, this seems like the natural next step.

I listened to a podcast from Canada called Deconstructing Dinner about CSAs adding grain to their usual vegetable subscriptions. I thought this was brilliant! The farmers were way into it, as growing wheat is seemingly effortless. They had no problem filling the orders and the customers loved it.
With the growing price of wheat (and the shortage world-wide), growing our own seems like the right thing to do.

I looked all over for first, local wheat seed,then American wheat seed, but to no avail. I ended up buying Ethiopion Blue Tinge wheat and Faust Barley from Canada(both easy to harvest without heavy equipment- you simply rub away the chaff with your hands or feet to get to the grain. The company is called Salt Spring Seeds.
Here's a little more info about the wheat.

Both can be planted in the fall, supposedly. I might just be too late, as the article I read about was written by a guy in British Columbia. Hmmm.

There's just so much to learn!

Just found this website about heritage wheats... very interesting.

I'm getting tired of peeling things

Last Sunday my husband obtained "free" pears. See, a guy he works with has a neighbor with a pear tree. The couple wanted none of their pears and my husband had a chance to take as many as he could for free. So he borrowed my brother's enormous truck (the one my brother never drives because he can't afford to gas it) because it has a ladder rack with a huge extension ladder tied to it.
Of course the truck was on empty when he picked it up. My husband barely made it to a gas station to gas up. He had to put $50 in just to get it to a half tank!
Then he proceeded to drive to the location of the ahem, free pears.

Ironically, I just enjoyed listening to a This American Life podcast titled, Something for Nothing. Essentially, all about how you can never get something for free.
Like pears. Our $50 pears.
I am grateful for all the effort that went into getting them though, believe me.

However, my husband enjoyed his time hanging out with his friend and teetering on the end of an extension ladder pulling pears from a single tree. He filled up that red recycling box pictured above (photo taken after I had processed half of them).
I have around 15 pears left (and a fruit fly colony that continues to gather strength and numbers) in the kitchen. The rest of the pears were made into pear butter, and cinnamon-spiced pear slices. I've got 21 quarts of pears, and that feels good. The kids love the pears too.

I swear I have blisters from the freakin' peeler.
And I felt like I had cankles after standing for hours at a time in the kitchen, peeling, peeling, peeling pears and putting them into lemon water.

So the pears are done.

Guess what? Me, my mom and the kids went to the apple orchard Friday. We visited Wasem's (very close to Lincoln High School for you locals).
It's a very nice place that forced me to buy loads of apples for making applesauce.
If you have time and want to hang out in the kitchen with me and This American Life podcasts, give me a shout. I've got a peeler with your name on it.

Mother Hubbard

I'm starting to become anxious about food for the winter. It doesn't seem we have as much as I had hoped for.
Fortunately, we have a lot of local resources available year-round. Flour, dried beans, meats, etc.

But I honestly had hoped to get more out of my many tomato plants than I have. There are loads of green tomatoes out there, but not a lot of prospects of those turning red before the frost hits.
I had hoped to have more things canned. I do have a good bit of soups canned and stored. The freezer is full. I wanted more corn. Have loads of potatoes and onions.
Argh. Don't know what I expected, maybe just more canned goods. However, I wanted to steer clear of canning a bunch of things just because we had the ingredients and a recipe, but that we might never ever eat (like that freakin' Chow Chow Relish).

See,it just dawned on me that it is indeed mid-September. I've had this incredibly introspective summer, which has been nice and worth-it, but sometimes I really wished I could have shrugged it off to blaze through my life at my more usual hectic pace.
It seems everything in my life has been put on a shelf for intense inspection and potential overhaul... feels as if I'm just coming out of that now.

So while I've been productive, I've also had my head well, in my head.
This is a bit cryptic, I understand. But I am feeling a bit like Mother Hubbard who has come out of an intense existential period.
I've read those Little House books and I know Caroline Ingalls would have had her shit way more together than I do now.
(And then I think of how good we women are at finding things to feel guilty about and I snarl at myself-- Stop It!)

On the upside, I must remember that I have a whole other crop of carrots, turnips, spinach, bok choy and radishes growing gloriously in the garden now as I type. That I will be able to add those to the shelves/freezer in a few weeks and things will fill out a little.

Must remind myself, this is our first year at trying to feed ourselves. We've done all right so far, even if I end up at Trader Joe's sometime in mid-February. We have a lot of food. We're lucky ducks.

That's more than I can say for the last 3 meat birds who are being offed this afternoon.

Onions and Potatoes

Since we planted our potatoes early, we had to harvest them early. We've been eating them for the last 6 weeks or so and they're delicious! Norland Reds in all sizes.

Last week, between busy times of prenatals and a very long labor, the second week of S in school (Girl Scout shenanigans and local theater stuff), oh, and plenty of sleep deprivation, we managed to get to our favorite farm folks in Sumpter. We bought two bushel baskets of enormous yellow storage onions for $8 a bushel. The kind lady also gave us around a dozen extra onions that were a little soft, to be used soon. We also bought 3 crates of potatoes-- two for $15 a piece. and one of small potatoes (to be used sooner) for $5.
So our little root cellar is starting to fill up a bit.

All those puny "onions" on the screen are drying. Those are the ones I toppled too soon in the garden. My little shallots.

I've just finished canning 4 little jars of pear butter and I'm waiting on 3 loaves of bread to finish up in the oven. Hurray for cooler weather and much needed rain here in Ypsiville! Tomorrow's high: only 63! Woo-hoo!

Found this lovely blog, A Year in Bread. Check it out, it's great.

Making Soup & Harvesting Carrots (are THOSE carrots?!)

I finally took a day to make a vat of chicken noodle soup. Our chicken, collards, parsley, and onions. The carrots were from some Michigan farmer that I'd had in the fridge for a couple months now. I needed to use those up before digging up ours. The egg noodles were from an Amish family at the farmer's market. I got a dozen quarts of chicken soup lined up on a shelf in the basement and it feels good. For one thing, I used one of the many chickens hogging space in the deep freezer. Secondly, it's so much nicer to have my family open a jar of lovingly made, nutritious soup as opposed to spending $40 on a pizza when I'm away at a birth.

Speaking of basement, holy cow! We cleaned ours out! It's a "Michigan basement". For those of you who don't know, that's a basement that's half dug out years after a house is built. Our house was built in 1860, I have no idea when the basement was dug out. It does make a perfect root cellar (I'm hoping) for the cold and damp down there. The actual little closet we're using as a root cellar previously held tools and about 30-some old cans of paint from various projects. I cleaned all that away (buying loads of kitty litter to absorb the old paint before the garbage men would take it). We have some shelves in that little closet, but that's where the "crawl space" begins too. So it's actual earth. Can't get much colder than that in the winter.
I also consolidated a bunch of crap to one area so that I would have on big section of shelves for all our canning stuff. My inner Control Freak heaved a sigh of relief last Sunday after all that was done.
Of course, spending 8 hours in a moldy, dusty basement made me cough and sputter for two days as my body worked up strange colors of phlegm to counteract all the funk. My lungs ached as if I chain smoked a pack of moldy cigarettes in a very short amount of time. But at least it's all organized down there now.

I harvested our carrots! I actually have more growing now. The current ones are Daikon carrots and they're young enough that I just thinned them yesterday. I can't remember the varieties I planted, except that they were all supposed to be good for long storage. A lot of them came out of the ground perfectly. Big, straight, tapered carrots that pulled up with no problems. Then I had a separate bunch that were not thinned so well. Those were interesting. It was like 20 or so bunches of 3-4 carrots that grew around each other in this crazy trick-puzzle type of way. You could actually separate the gnarled carrots and fit them back into place again if you were careful not to break any piece. They're like the Jim Henson version of carrots.

At any rate, I've stored them in a wooden box, layered in moist sand as the book, Root Cellaring describes. They're down in the root cellar with the ever-decreasing supply of early summer potatoes (will have to buy more from local farmer to see us through winter) and onions.

Speaking of onions, learn from my mistakes, novice urban farmers. I planted around 60 or so yellow storage onions from sets, not seed. They took beautifully and looked very promising. Apparently though, one must take care to not let the green tops get knocked over. That sends the signal for the onions to halt! And they do. Most of our "onions" got toppled by a heavy garden hose weeks ago, leaving us with 60 or so yellow storage shallots.
I suppose I can harvest those today. Sigh.

I gave a friend of mine 20 sets of those same yellow onions and she brought me a couple of her newly harvested beauties. And guess what? They were the size of a healthy medium apple. That's to say, they were onion-sized. So now I, and you, know what to do next summer.

I've also been drying little yellow pear tomatoes a lot lately in my fabu Excalibur Food Dehydrator.
They smell lovely when they're done, and take up far less space than canned tomatoes.I used to freeze them, but didn't like how watery they were when thawed out. My dream is to use them to make gorgeous dried tomato cream sauce this winter and to use them in soups and casseroles.

Just wanted to say, pardon the blurry pictures. I've been noticing this happening more often with my wee camera. I think years of letting the kids wander around with it, taking pictures of stuffed animals in the backyard has resulted in little, greasy fingers touching the lens and leaving me with blurry pictures.

All right, I'm off to can some salsa and pears. (My husband's co-worker gave us a good size bag of pears last week! I'd love to make some yummy chutney to go with Indian food.)