Showing posts with label apples. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apples. Show all posts

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Our garden, a little tour

I promised I'd show you some pictures of and around our garden, so here goes...

This is one of our several semi-dwarf apple trees. They're about 6 years old, and not producing like the dickens yet. The fruits tend to be small and ugly (we don't use chemicals), but the flavor is so complex, it's like the best Pink Lady you've never eaten. ;)I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:The corn is doing splendidly too:We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears: Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:One of our green bean beds:The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Sunday, September 28, 2008

A variety of things

First of all, the first 2 photos are in response to Gracefruit's post asking about one's favorite pots and pans. This top one is a cast iron chicken fryer that is good for pretty much everything we need to fry.This next one is an all-purpose 6.5 quart pasta pot that boils water really fast. It's light-weight so I'm thinking it's aluminum with a stainless steel coating. I think we'll be really sad if it ever broke for some reason.We spent a good part of the day yesterday processing apples and peppers to dehydrate them. I washed everything, dh sliced, and the kids ran the apple peeler as well as placed the slices on the dehydrator trays.Here are the peppers, all dried and shrivelled.The kids, bagging them up.Well, back to cleaning bathrooms...

"Happiness depends upon ourselves." ~ Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

Friday, September 26, 2008

Harvests, etc.

I didn't have a whole lot to write about, being out of the house most of the days this week, but seeing how Little Shadow Creations needed a non-giveaway post to comment on (*grin*), I thought I'd oblige.

This is just a small portion of the apples that we either harvested from our trees or got from our friends C and D's trees. They may not look like the Stepford-Wives-perfect apples you find at a grocery store, but these look this way because they've never been sprayed with nasty stuff.Besides, the dehydrated apples that came out in the end were pretty perfect, and so amazingly tasty:We dehydrated twice already, and may have to do more as there are still 3 large baskets full of apples in the garage.

I also need to rhapsodize about our bell peppers. We've had a very nice crop this year. Just look at these beauties:And last, but not least, I'd like to mention a great site that I found from Suzanne's blog (which is always a treasure) - Operation NICE. What a terrific concept! It wouldn't kill anyone to be a lot nicer to others. Luckily, nearly everyone that I've met in the Blog World have been wonderful human beings.

"Happiness depends upon ourselves." ~ Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

What have we been up to?

Oh, a lil' of this, a lil' of that.

I set up the telescope Saturday night and while we couldn't see the Great Red Spot, we did see the 4 largest moons of Jupiter. Our own moon was nearly full and was so bright that we felt like we were staring at the sun. Could see the craters on the southern edge really well though.

Sunday, we picked up lamb from the processors (many thanks to our friend, C!), and then picked tons of apples from C's trees, and some grapes from C's mom's little vineyard. I forgot to take a photo of this year's crop of grapes, but it's not as huge as the one from 2004:And then Ike blew through. We were worried we couldn't get home as we only had one route to get home with the bridge being closed, but luckily no large trees came down on the roads we took, although many trees did come down all over the county. In fact, as of today, there were still thousands without electricity. We were lucky to have lost power for only 20 minutes.

Monday morning, I rescued an oven bird that had crashed into our window. After propping it up in the sunniest spot I could find on a cool morning, it recovered enough in about an hour to fly away.

Monday night, inspired by Gracefruit's jamming, I made grape jelly with the grapes we had picked (and the boys and dh had processed).Not as pretty as I'd like (a bit too cloudy), but I'm pleased that it went smoothly and well, and, boy, do the grapes smell fabulous.

And the rest is pretty much the usual - out most of the day the past several days with homeschool stuff. Whoever thinks that homeschoolers don't get enough "socialization" has never met a homeschooled child. Even with a homebody mom (I have always wanted to be a hermit when I grew up), my kids end up interacting with a lot of people all the time.

"Happiness depends upon ourselves." ~ Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Food, glorious food

Or, more like, food, lots of brown food. I was going to make paper today, but baked instead: chocolate challah (for French class tomorrow)blondies, for our literary co-op on Thursdayand apple sauce because our friend C and our neighbor A gave us apples that needed to be used.Dh made some brown-ish food yesterday - vegetarian pad thai (with tofu). Man, was it ever good!Amazingly, the peanuts we grew a couple of years ago were still good. We kept them in the freezer, and roasted and chopped them for the pad thai dish.

"To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act." ~ Anatole France (1844 - 1924)