What a week. A good week, for sure – but stuffed so full it takes mental effort to separate the days, one from the other. The peaches and the zucchini and the canning and the baking feel steamrollered into one week long blur. It’s a memory fruit leather.
Here’s this week’s list of accomplishments. Please join in, and list your own weekly (or monthly, or whatever!) 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.
Planting & Maintaining
I finally got out there and tackled some of late-summer maintenance. The biggest summer producers are still pounding out food. Still haven’t transplanted my fall crops yet. I hope you guys are more on schedule than I am this year.
- Pruned and tied up tomatoes
- Pruned up cucumbers
- General weeding of the main garden and perennial bed
Harvesting
- Tomatoes
- Cucumbers
- Summer Squash
- Blackberries
- Blueberries
- Cabbage
- Green Beans
- Onions
- Basil
- Oregano
- Hot peppers
- Pears
- Peaches
- Potatoes
- Kale – my son “helped” me harvest by cutting down every Cavolo Nero kale plant I was growing. All that kale is now blanched and frozen. Le sigh.
Preserving
- Canned Dill Pickle Slices
- Canned Thai Sweet and Spicy Pickles
- Canned Peaches in Syrup
- Canned Nectarines with Ginger and Lime
- Canned Peach Ginger Syrup
- Froze Fresh Tomato Sauce with Garlic and Basil
- Froze Whole Tomatoes
- Blanched and froze kale.
- Made and froze 11 jars of Lemon Walnut Pesto
- Baked and froze 8-dozen Chocolate Chip Zucchini Muffins and 4-loaves Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread. I following this basic formula but left out the cinnamon and everything almond and substituted in chocolate chips.
- Baked and froze Apple Cake.
- Dried Peaches
- Dried Diced Tomatoes
- Dried Green Beans
- Dried Zucchini Chips with Black Pepper and Parm (so yum!)
- Dried Mango
Cooking & Eat Down The Larder
A few noteworthy meals:
- Steak, sauteed garden veg and roasted garlic fingerling potatoes (pictured above). Date night in for Homebrew Husband and me.
- Zucchini fritters. I believe I have discovered the trick to the best zucchini fritter ever: lots of lemon zest and parm.
- Grilled hot dogs out back over the fire pit with the neighbor kids at “sunset” during the eclipse.
Animals
- Basic maintenance.
- Adjusted duck tub pump for shorter run time in cooler weather.
Business, Finances & Frugality
- Over $510 of direct funding on my Patreon page.
- I’ve mentioned GoodBudget – the app we really like for recording our spend – enough. The two other budgeting tools my friends over at Mr Money Mustache arm wrestle about are You Need A Budget and Mint. If you’re looking for a budget management or tracking solution, take a look at all three to see what works best for your situation.
Energy Use & Solar Panel Production
- Replaced halogen work lights in the vent hood with these LEDs. Our halogen vent hood lights were some of the last non-LEDs in the house and they were big electricity hogs, but until recently it wasn’t possible to get cost-effective LED PAR20s.
Solar Panels:
- Total electricity used: 194 kWh
- Total solar energy produced: 189 kWh (= $101.55 in production incentive)
- Energy purchased: 5 kWh (= $0.52 in net spend)
- Total earned through our solar panels this week: $101.03
Home, Homeschooling & Family
- Deep cleaned the kitchen after canning and baking chaos. It was hands-and-knees, scrubbing peach peels off the floor type cleaning. Afterwards, I went and took a 40 minute nap.
- Oliver: basic tablework, including reading, handwriting, phonics, and math.
- Bella: music, music composition, history, writing, research skills.
- Nick continued curriculum planning for the “official” school year. I still have more to do but didn’t get a whole lot done on that this week.
- School is so close. I feel the acute presence of the beginning of the school year far more now that we homeschool.
Planning and Research
- Uh….does watching Jeff Piotrowski’s Periscope feed from the carwash in Rockport, TX count? Blue shed lives! The winds might have backed off, but Harvey isn’t over yet. Please stay safe Texas friends and don’t drive through floodwater!
• • •
What do you use the dried diced tomatoes for? Is there a particular advantage to dice versus sliced tomatoes for drying?
If you are going to use them in soup, diced are nice. But in this case I diced because I will blend into powder for spice mixes.
Your list is amazing.
I am about to settling in to do a ton of tomatoes. Tragically, I had blanched, peeled, packed, and started an entire kettle of tomatoes, when I got a phone call about an emergency. The type that you simply turn off the burner, get in your car, and go. And so an entire box of tomatoes, wasted. Upside, nothing really bad ended up happening in the emergency. But, I had to deal with completely re-cleaning pots of tomatoes that had been left out overnight with flies, and tomato residue, and ….just…..damn. One of those absolute sideways moments. But everything is going back through the wash, and I’ll start again shortly.
I have NOT given myself botulism with my pressure canning. Go me! The chili recipe in the new Ball Book is really quite good. I’ll probably change the seasonings to suit my tastes, but it has been super satisfying to have home-cooked food available, not from the freezer.
Question! I also tried the Aztec Chicken Soup which has superb flavor, but the chicken (predictably) dried out. It is still definitely good enough to eat, just not perfect. Is there any reason I cannot replace the chicken with an equivalent amount of pork? If I used the exact same weight and cut it the same size? I’m still learning which rules I can bend and which are hard core.
After the tomatoes, I’m going to go through a slew of the bean recipes in your book. Having tasty food, in a jar, not having to be defrosted, not taking up space in the freezer – it’s the difference between going out to eat and having dinner ready in under five minutes. That is huge as far as my home economy and health goes.
I got my solar payment about from PSE for the last year and am quite pleased. With the incentive plans, solar has totally been worth it. Will look forward to receiving that check.
Was visiting family this week, but still managed to get my hands dirty!
Harvested (from MIL’s garden)
Kale
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Preserved with MIL
Dried kale
Whole canned tomatoes
And then I stopped by my grandparents on the day they had ordered 6 bushels of sweet corn, so helped them blanch and freeze most of it. All in all a great week away, and looking forward to catching up in my garden.
I been pruning grape vines, raspberries and blackberries like nobody’s business. I don’t have as much growing this year, but am harvesting lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, herbs and some plums as they are starting to fall out of the tree and turn into scary, hairy sacks of dirt, mold and dog spittle. Or something. It’s pretty unidentifiable. I’m carefully watching the apples as well. I have a horrible history of picking everything too early, so this year I’m going out of my way to wait until they *should* be picked.
My mom casually asked me yesterday when school started and I really haven’t been paying attention to the fact that we are “supposed” to start up next week. I better dust off the curriculum that I set up back in June and get cracking.
It’s been hot so I’ve been occasionally using our giant laundry umbrella thingy to line dry clothes, but it’s pretty sporadic. I don’t have time in the morning on the days I go in to work, mainly because I’ve been running first thing and don’t have the gumption to get up earlier than 5:45 to hang clothes.