Fall harvests

This post is dedicated to my mom who passed away on Oct. 23 of 2010. She loved gardening and was always hugely enthusiastic about hubby's gardening endeavors. I think I have a photo of her, when she visited us one year, helping to pick hickory nuts meat out of the hickory trees that grow on our property. It's very cute. If I find it, I'll post it next time.

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So it's officially autumn and we've had two frosts. But, thanks to floating row covers, we still have a good bit of veggies to harvest.

Yesterday, hubby picked the following goodies: from back to front - choi sum, green onions, celery, and dill.

We froze the choi sum for later, but hubby put the other three things into salmon cakes (it was what's for dinner!).

He also harvested salad makings: spinach, leaf lettuce, and bib lettuce. Here they are all shredded up in the spinner.

I love still being to eat from our own garden this time of year!

Are you harvesting anything tasty from your garden? If you are, tell me what you're growing. If not, I encourage you to grow a fall garden next year.

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

Autumn gardening

How did we commemorate the beginning of October? By gardening, of course!

If you're not out there weeding and planting and tending this time of year, you won't have a nice fall/winter crop to harvest. You don't need a fancy greenhouse either, just some row-covers if you plant cold-hardy crops. If you want to go the fancy greenhouse route, check out Eliot Coleman's books to learn more.

Here are the kids, weeding (before harvesting tomatoes and peppers); no, they don't always have goofy grins while weeding, but they don't complain about having to do it either:

So what are we weeding and tending to? Well, there's choi sum:

and lettuce:

and carrots:

and don't forget the cabbage (although that was planted a while ago) :

Another nice fall crop is kale. It's highly cold tolerant.  Hubby grew 2 different varieties this year:

We're also harvesting some end-of-summer crops like potatoes (no pic, sorry) and sweet potatoes:

Sweet potatoes as big as footballs (with the density of bowling balls) -

Here's a more mature choi-sum that hubby's been harvesting already:

Hubby re-planted some summer squash after vine borers killed our squash plants earlier this summer.  We've been getting a really nice harvest from them.  Both the patty-pans:

and the summer squash:

Because we needed room for the new plantings, hubby pulled out a bunch of volunteer dill plants and I hung them up to dry.  Who needs Halloween decorations when you have these?

I hope you're running a nice Autumn garden yourself!  Next up: tomato pie recipes.

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

The passing...of a chicken and of the week

I missed my Tuesday and Thursday themes, obviously. Between being out all day and the internet connection not working, blogging just never happened.

I was going to recap the week with a few photos, but first, I have some sad news to report. Our favorite chicken, Alpina, died this morning. It looked like she suffered from an impacted egg. Alpina was the smartest (I swear she was smarter than some dogs I've met) chicken with a spunky personality - would never let one of our roosters mate with her, would be the first one to come running when you have a bug for them, and would try to knock food out of your hands if you don't feed her fast enough. It's always fun to watch chickens, but doubly so with watching Alpina. We'll miss her a lot.Remember the dill we were drying a few weeks back? Here it is, dried and put into a jar. It smells wonderful!And here is some of our dill on buttered new potatoes that we just harvested a few days ago:Speaking of harvest, I can't remember if I showed you the one measly strawberry harvest that we got this year:I hope that next year's harvest will be less pathetic. We've put in a new bed this spring.

This is the first wild black raspberries harvest of the year. We put them on the pan to flash freeze before putting them into freezer bags.And last, but not least on a random thoughts sort of theme, this is one of the plates that ds#2 made that I had wanted to sell on Etsy. But, it was sold to dh's uncle when the crew came to visit last weekend. Guess we'll have to make more!Speaking of Etsy, I noticed a lot of people have started ArtFire accounts as well. I'm wondering if anyone can tell me the advantage of one over the other, if you have a preference, and any other thoughts you might have on this. Thanks!

I hope everyone's week was a good one, with no sad news. Any good plans for this coming week and the Fourth of July 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

Thankful Thursday

I'm thankful for harvests from our garden!

This was the first salad of the season (last month). I believe it had dill, spinach, two types of lettuce, and a bit of little broccoli.I strung up some dill - and hung them in front of the sliding glass door in the dining area - that dh harvested a couple of days ago. This is only about a quarter of the harvest!Our strawberries aren't as plentiful this year, but enough for us to enjoy them with ice cream!Because I like Teri's interactive endings to her blog posts so much, I'll steal the idea from her. :) What are you harvesting right now?

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