I took a few days vacation last week and went on a lovely camping adventure with family and friends, which is why there wasn’t a Homestead Report last week.
It’s always fun to leave a garden during peak growth. Four days away seems to equal miles of squash vines and zillions of cucumbers and green beans. My first job, after putting away all the camping gear, was harvesting and making a plan for the bounty.
Here’s this week’s list of accomplishments. Please join in, and 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.
Planted & Maintained
- Set up simple overhead watering system to keep the garden irrigated while we were gone. Nothing fancy.
- Tied up cucumbers.
- Re-tied tomato that collapsed when its twine support broke.
- Summer pruned some ornamental trees right before we left for camping.
Harvested
- Corn! Came back to a bunch of corn ready to eat!
- Broccoli. All the spring broccoli is done. Good, now I have a place for the fall broccoli. Crop rotation? Uhhhh…maybe next time?
- Blueberries – tons!
- Blackberries
- Zucchini and patty pan summer squash.
- Long Pie Pumpkin.
Sidenote: There was a little harvesting mistake with the pumpkin.
I sent my daughter out to harvest “the cucumbers on the trellis near the greenhouse and the summer squash.” Well, she saw the huge, green long pie pumpkin that was growing near the greenhouse, thought it was a super overgrown zucchini, and cut two, 14″-ish long winter squash from the vines. Then she came in to tell me she needed a bigger harvesting container for all the zucchini.
I’ll admit, I had a moment of “I need everyone to just not talk to me right now.” The good news is, the Long Pie is really prolific this year, so we’ll still get plenty of squash of the plants. And one of the squash Bella prematurely harvested was damaged through the rind anyway, and would never have kept without rotting. No loss there.
The damaged pumpkin went to the birds, the other one is green, but otherwise mature, so I’ll figure out some way to use it, even if just in zucchini bread. It all works out in the end.
- Asian Plums. So. Many. Plums. Never plant more than one Asian Plum tree. Even one multigraft Asian Plum is 50% more than I can reasonably deal with.
- Onions
- Basil
- Tomatoes! Holy tomato time Batman, it’s happening.
- Hot peppers
Preserved
- Plum jelly
- Asian plum sauce
- Plum butter
Can you tell that I had a lot of plums to harvest? And they are just getting started – the plums this year are stupid.
Cooked + Eat Down The Larder
- Frittata – I’ve made two large frittata in the past two days. The first was onion, pepper, ham and swiss. The second was zucchini, feta and fresh tomato.
Camping used up a few pantry staples:
- Hot dogs were served with home canned chili.
- Salmon tacos were served with home canned black beans.
- Turkey and brie sandwiches were spread with homemade savory cherry sauce. I’m not sure how to describe this preserve – it’s somewhere between a fruit ketchup, a barbecue sauce and a chutney. Goes great with poultry or pork.
- Last fall’s Apple Pie Filling was used to make Campfire Pies in our new pie irons. Campfire Pies are a total success! I like them more than s’mores, which can get a bit sweet for my taste. Highly recommended for all car campers out there.
Animals
- Cleaned coop right before we left for camping.
- Our fly traps are working like a treat. Seriously, if you have urban chickens, get some of these traps. I know they seem kinda spendy but they work for weeks and weeks to kill flies.
- Our neighbor watched our birds while we were away. All cluckers and quackers were alive upon our return.
Business, Finances and Frugality
- Almost to $470 per month of direct funding on my Patreon page. Things are finding a nice groove. Last month’s Q&A and Livechat sessions were great.
- We bought a new cooler for camping to replace the old soft-sided coolers I’ve had since my catering days, forever ago. The cooler is a Yeti, and it was spendy, but I gotta say it did a great job at keeping the food cold. Our meat was still semi-frozen after spending 3 days in a baking hot car.
- Haven’t updated GoodBudget yet this week.
Energy Use & Solar Panel Production
- Total electricity used: 177 kWh. This is interesting because it shows something approaching a baseline for our house with all the systems (fridge, freezer, various pumps, etc.) running, since we were all gone for half of the week. In comparison, an “average” US household uses 225 kWh per week. An “average” German household uses 68 kWh per week. (Source) Still a long way to go.
- Total solar energy produced: 217 kWh (= $116.59 in production incentive). A haze from B.C. wildfires settled over the Puget Sound region this week and impacted solar production. It looked like L.A. in the 1970s. Seattleites were mighty unpleased, although the orange moon was pretty cool.
- Energy “sold back”: 40 kWh (= $4.13 in net production)
- Total earned through our solar panels this week: $120.72
Homeschooling & Family
Camping was nice. There was hiking, s’mores, breathtaking mountain views, campfire chatter, a Jr. Ranger program for the kids and zero wifi – all the essentials for a successful trip to the woods.
Lots of stuff happened that you could creatively file as homeschooling while we were camping. That’s kinda the point of homeschooling. Life and school bleed together.
- Oliver was very excited by the Jr. Ranger program that let him earn a Ranger Badge.
- He also spend hours (of both his time and the adults on the trip) building axes with shards of rock and sticks, and then bashing away at fallen logs with his new ax.
- We’ve restarted “formal” schooling after taking July off. I don’t really have a strong opinion about year-round schooling, but Oliver, in particular, falls out of the habit of table work pretty quickly, and then it’s a battle to get him back in the groove.
- Trip to the library for early readers for Oliver, and free reading material for Bella.
- Bella’s making very good progress on her summer research paper on the Ancient Greek colonization of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. Her formal outline is done and she’s begun her first draft.
- I’m beginning to plan for Fall and formal classes. It’s coming up so soon! We have an excellent schedule of classes at our Homeschool campus.
Planning and Research
- I’m currently really into the idea of celebrations that are based on traditional harvest times and seasonal markers. Basically the traditional Pagan holidays, but secularized to be more of an acknowledgment of seasonal rhythms through the year.
- I’m also just getting back into research that goes into upcoming homeschool projects and areas of focus. Post-Antiquity and Middle Ages, here we come.
• • •
I had the same problem of a Long Pie pumpkin getting prematurely harvested this week. Except it wasn’t me that harvested it, it was thieves at our community garden plot! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr……. The upside is my DH has now agreed to build me three more raised beds in my backyard, so that we don’t have to mess with a community garden plot again. This is the second time this summer that we’ve had veg stolen. Crossing fingers that no more of my pumpkins (or anything else) go missing before harvest!
I would like to know more about both Long Pie pumpkins AND this savoury cherry sauce you’ve made. They sound like excellent things indeed. 😀
Also: Wheel of the Year celebration markers are great – whether they’re religious or not. (Honestly, the biggest difference is in how you phrase your thanks). I’ve got a friend who was home-schooled their whole life, and they did this, too.
Long Pie pumpkins are a pie pumpkin that is shaped almost like a fat zucchini (hence the harvesting problems). They’re also EXTREMELY short season, and are perfect for those of us with short growing seasons. I had “ripe enough to pick” pumpkins less than 3 months from planting the first year I grew them. And they store very well for winter. And they’re a great pie pumpkin!
I often harvest my winter squashes (including long pie pumpkins) while still green. It’s actually one of my space-saving techniques, so I do to have to plant separate summer and winter squash.
They taste like zukes, only less watery and more flavor. Slice and sauté with onions and butter and herbs of choice (sage is very nice)…you won’t be sad.
RE: early picking of Long Pie Pumpkins. If the “ground spot” has turned from yellow to orange it is ripe enough to pick and will continue to turn orange in storage! Seriously!
Also, if you’ve never grown Long Pies before, I swear that vine ripened ones have one of the hardest shells I’ve ever had to deal with. I gave up splitting them to roast properly (this requires a cleaver and a hammer and is NOT good fun), I stabbed them a couple times and then roasted them whole. Won’t work if you’re saving seeds, but SO MUCH EASIER!!
Harvested:
green beans
cucumbers
cherry tomatoes
planted:
carrots
kale
fall greens
Garden work: set up the sprinkler which is a rarity in these useually rainy parts but above seeds weren’t germinating in the almost drought..
Preserved: picked and froze 6 qts raspberries and 1 qt blueberries and ate several more
Finances – First big student loan payment out the door! (many more to go)
I hung a similar type of fly trap ($5 at the feed store) but had a critter chew it open after just a few days. The ones I’ve used all say they need to be in a sunny area to work well but I have limited sun in my animal areas.
Does the one you have work in the shade?
I’d love to have a recipe for this savory cherry sauce thing you talk about. It sounds fun!
I’m trying to tie our celebrations around harvesting & season changes, too! I have no strong religious ties and my husband is secularly Hindu and we’re trying to establish our family traditions – we figured pagan is a good foundation. I’d love to hear some of the things you start doing. We try to make sun shaped bread for the summer solstice. And I researched Yule last year. It’s hard to get on track when it isn’t something that everyone around us does – sneaks up on me.
As for us – we’re making a plan & supplies list to fix our hoop house (wind damage). I left the cured garlic out in the rain accidentally and so made a ton of toum – we’ll see if it freezes well. I also tried my hand at homemade hummus (even removed the chickpea skins) but it wasn’t as delicious as I had expected. I ordered a cover crop mix to build organic matter and help suppress weeds for the upcoming year. And I’m day dreaming about fruit & nut guilds.
Our family is trying to celebrate the seasons this way too. Some of the holidays are a little easier than others, like the spring equinox and winter solstice, since most of the Christian traditions celebrated widely in the US were borrowed from the pagan traditions, but we’ve just started getting into more ideas for the harvest festivals and summer solstice. It’s a nice way to step back and be thankful/grateful for the things in your life even if you’re not thankful TO something or someone, for those of us who aren’t necessarily religious. Thanks for including this in your post. It is really nice to hear that we’re not the only ones doing this!
You’re not the only ones. 🙂 My husband and I decided to make Winter Solstice our immediate family’s holiday instead of Christmas about 6 years ago, and to celebrate Summer Solstice as well. It definitely has made for interesting scheduling with school on several occasions and there have been other challenges but it fits really well with our value system (we are spiritual but not religious). I’ve noticed a trend locally (I live in Nor. California) and also online of others slowly starting to do the same….I think it’s great!
I do love that traditional pagan holidays are all about seasonal food issues. There are 8 major holidays, the solstices (2), 3 spring holidays (marking the emergence of certain edibles and the planting of others, and 3 fall/harvest holidays.
Regarding the green pumpkin, the first thing I though of was the green pumpkin pie from “The Long Winter”.
http://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/recipe-the-long-winter-green-pumpkin-apple-pie/
And regarding the holidays, I was reading up about Harvest Home, which was an early harvest festival that seems to have disappeared from common celebration.
Hey Erica, if you’re so inclined, a description of how you did your Campfire Pies would be much appreciated. Also, regarding seasonal holidays, Waldorf methodology offers what I think are some nice traditions, especially for kids. And, not that it’s Waldorf, but I started celebrating El Dia De Los Muertos 5 or 6 years ago with my kids as a way to broaden the scope of our experience with death (and life!) and I really enjoy it.
Harvested:
Cherry tomatoes
Zucchini
Kale
Wild blackberries
Garden:
Pulled out all my cucumbers, which were less than a foot tall and looked SO sad. Some kind of mold/fungus in the roots. Not sure what’s up there.
Finished rehabbing a secondhand grill and got it cooking!
Planted some fall peas
Preserved:
Made 9 quarts of pickles – cucumbers from my CSA farmer
Was going to make blueberry jam, but the crushed berries and sugar mixture molded after 2 days in the fridge. Disappointed but not completely surprised; that flat of berries was very quick to mold.
Made a batch of cherry chutney – 4 half pints
Made batch 2 of kombucha – trying it with a piece of candied ginger in secondary.
Well, since I’ve been unsuccessful at recalibrating my garden size to feed two people (kids are gone), I’m taking a 25 lb or so box of goodies to the Thurston County Food bank. I send them only keepers, no culls, which go to the chickens or the compost. Gave them all of the napa cabbage, because I’m just not going to get to kimchi this year.
Gave up on thinning the pears and apples, they’re just going to be small. Much effort going into training the second year table grapes. Cleaned up the flower beds. Completed the drip irrigation for the deck.
Removed a couple of volunteer plants that were turning out as busts, but the volunteer pumpkin is climbing the trellis formerly used by the snap peas, and is pumping out perfect sized little sugar pumpkins. Corraling that thing has taken a considerable effort, as it wanted to send shoot out everywhere.
Transplanted broccoli, brokali, brussels sprouts and lettuce into space freed up by garlic harvest and spring brassicas. Started spinach, more lettuce, swiss chard.
PIcked: romano string beans, french filet beans, lettuce, cilantro, tomatoes, lemon cukes, slicing cukes, zucchini, green and yellow patty pan squash, two types of kale, cutting celery, jalapenos, sunflowers, sweet peas, dahlias, blueberries, himalaya blackberries. Oh yeah, and the most darling fruit of all, the Mexican Sour Gherkins! They are adorable, and they ferment quickly into delectable pickles. I will EAT THEM ALL.
Really enjoying watching the halona musk melons and sweet potatoes in the greenhouse develop. Hung several melons in slings made of nylon foot-socks so they don’t tear off of the trellised vine. Who knew Japanese sweet potatoes had the sweetest little purple flowers, that look a little like datura?