I feel like I’m sorta waiting at this time of year. I’m between the big garden planting push, but not yet to the big harvesting and food preservation push. I’m trying to just enjoy the little maintenance chores and get a few home projects out of the way before canning season really hits.
So, here’s my weekly list of accomplishments, recorded in the hopes that this practice will help keep me motivated and accountable.
If you want to join in, please feel free to list your own weekly achievements in the comments, or if you have a blog and want to do your own post and link it up, that’s great too. But! It’s not a race or a competition. We all just gotta do what we can, where we are, with what we have.
Planting & Maintenance
- Basic watering, weeding and training of stuff like tomatoes and cucumbers.
- Sprayed garden with Alaska Fish Emulsion to give plants a boost.
- My tomatoes are showing signs of potassium deficiency (it’s always something) so I side-dressed half the plants with kelp meal as an experiment to see if that helps perk them up.
- Sprayed Bt to control the second generation of cabbage moth caterpillar on my brassicas.
- Still haven’t planted the greenhouse. It just might not happen this year.
Harvesting
- Lettuce – man I have a lot of lettuce right now!
- Chard
- Kale
- Strawberries
- Red Currants
- Cherries
- 1 single blueberry
- Summer squash – zucchini season is here!
Preserving
- I began recipe testing 5 lacto-fermentation recipes. Recipes will go up on the blog eventually if they make the cut.
- Pressure canned pinto beans and black beans (second batch of beans in two weeks).
- Made several freezer meals as part of an ingredients-into-food push (see below).
- Made and froze chipotle honey butter.
Cooking
- I feel like I have a lot of food in my larder for this time of year when I should be getting ready to fill it up. Does anyone want to do an Eat Down The Larder July with me?
- Big batch cooking to use up random bits and bobs in the pantry and fridge that were pissing me off. I made: a huge batch of Bolognese sauce (used up some carrots, onion and celery that were getting sad); a pot of chicken, veg and bean soup (used up bean broth from canning pinto beans and lots of random veg; some quick Chicken Mole (this used up a bar of Theo Chili Dark Chocolate that has been in the cupboard for at least 18 month; several meatloaves (used up the last of my Apricot Barbecue sauce).
- Made crackers with Oliver. This was super fun!
Animals
- Basic daily maintenance.
- Feed run to restock poultry feed.
Household and Projects
- Massive laundry push to clean and freshen all bed linens, comforters, pillows, etc. while (quite literally) the sun was shining. Line dried sheets are the best, people.
- Reorganized my pantry – it had slumped into “hot mess” status. This process was made slightly more interesting when our new kittens discovered my canning jar boxes.
- Reorganized and consolidated my spices which were at the “warm mess” stage.
- Cleaned the stove and vent hood – so far past “hot mess” we were closing in on “dumpster fire.”
- Finished moving and stacking firewood.
- Broke down all the cardboard we hoard for when we need it to mulch something.
Business, Finances and Frugality
- Crossed $400 per month of direct funding on my Patreon page. If I counted right, in the month of June I published 29 Patron-only videos, announcements, blog posts, Q&A chats, etc. The vast majority of that content is available to Patrons for as low as a buck a month, so it’s a pretty great content return on investment.
- We had to push to get caught up with our spending recording in GoodBudget yesterday. We’ve found it’s really important to be “square” with your entries before the first of the month, or else you throw off your current month’s budget lines and it’s a real pain to reconcile.
Energy Use & Solar Panel Production
- Total electricity used: 189 kWh (Gah! For this time of year, this is nothing to brag about.)
- Total solar energy produced: 241 kWh (= $129.49 in production incentive)
- Energy “sold back”: 52 kWh ($5.46 in net production)
- Total earned through our solar panels this week: $134.95
Homeschooling
- Nothing this week beyond life! The kids still read, and Bella plays piano and does dance for fun, but no formal schooling this week. Do you guys “do school” over the summer?
- If you missed it, here is why we homeschool.
Planning and Research
- Wheat futures. All y’all prepper types might want to make sure you are topped up on wheat berries.
• • •
We have huge grub problems on our tomatillos, which is devastating because you just get mostly-rotten tomatillos that only reveal themselves when you go to harvest. We also use Bt, and when I couldn’t find the sprayer this year we started applying with a watering can. We think it might be WAY more effective than the backpack sprayer, since we’ve been applying less and controlling the grubs more effectively. I’m not sure what method you use, but I’d be interested to hear you thoughts — corroborating or otherwise.
Garden: Catch and release, onto the road, slug and snail program. The wee buggers are just killing my bush beans this year.. I am on Whidbey so tomatoes and peppers are grown in a green house. Have some really nice fruit set from that last hot stretch. Harvesting lettuce, baby kale, and strawberries for nibbling.
Picked 7 pounds a strawberries from a local u-pick place. Made Strawberry sauce, Strawberry Jam (lemon and pomegranate liqueur) made with your technique, but I added Pomona’s Pectin, because I have had trouble making the strawberries set. Also macerated a bunch for Strawberry Shortcake – YUM. Made a half gallon of yogurt and I finally managed to make it work. I guess third time is the charm. The coolest project I accomplished was making homemade cream cheese ( used half of the batch to make Scream Cheese) so good and easy. My guys dropped the pots in the sound so things are started to get busy. Have a great weekend everyone>
This weekly post has really inspired me to start listing this stuff in my garden journal. Except this week, when I’m actually around to share here.
Garden and Harvest:
Weed and water, do all the regular things. Chipped some prunings.
Listened to Encyclopedia Botanica for the first time and learned what to do to my Brussel Sprouts .Used lettuce, basil, microgreens, mustard leaves for salads.
Garlic scapes (made pesto and froze a bunch)
Kale – enough for my first ever Me Grown pan of kale chips
Preserving:
Dried grapes, bananas and pears that were languishing because it’s stone fruit season!! Made and froze a bunch of stock from my veg trimmings
Dried mints and rotated them by age. Time to make tea blends.
Frugality:
Cleaned out the fridge and froze more lunches or ate a lot of things. Made a dinner all from food sourced locally except the spices and olives. Proud! Made flatbreads with spring wheat, and rye and nutmeal crackers from my own ground grain (gasps at wheat berry article) – these are AMAZING and EASY. Will be making both again. The naan is almost a weekly thing by now, and good with any flour I’ve tried so far.
The Tree Swallows have moved on, so I can finally get into the garden again. Now if only it would stop raining…..I know there are areas that are very dry this year, but we’re not one of them. We tend to be pretty wet anyways, but this year….well, flooding has been the norm this year. My raised beds are sopping wet. Close to 12hrs after the last storm yesterday and if I pick up a handful of dirt out of a bed it still drips.
Thankfully most of the garden is doing surprisingly well despite the over abundance of water. Maybe not as well as normal, but not as bad as I was afraid.
Gosh, the caterpillars on my kale, radishes, arugula are BAD this year… I’ve sprayed BT twice, gonna have to do it again. Crazy. They don’t even bother to hide, just out there for me to see on the back of the leaves. Shameless. Lost the last bit of chard to miners. I was doing pretty good up until this week. Hooray for sun!! Not quite 60 at night but pepper and eggplant going in to the ground. Tomato plants have loved this week of sun/warmth. Lots of green tomatoes finally but wow, so far behind last year. I pulled my potatoes today. YUM. Finally got 4lbs of bing cherries to make BBQ sauce. Planted more lettuce. Gosh if I could grow one thing, it would be lettuce. I might try and grow it year round. In went more scallions and weeding, weeding, weeding. This year is so condensed. Seems like everything was so late to get going and now I am bombarded with greens. How the heck do you have zucc’s already Erica? Mine just flowered… Totally in for an eat from the pantry July. My pantry is a mess and mostly it is due to being full of random stuff. Finally, love patreon. Thank you for creating such a great forum!